Intel BOXDP35DPM LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard Item# N82E16813121314

My review of the Intel BOXDP35DPM LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard

Purchased 10/3/2007, installed 10/15/2007

It's too bad that Newegg has deactivated this item. I wasn't even able to write a review and help the others having trouble. So, I'll do it here and hopefully Google will find a way to make it show up in searches. I give this board five stars so far. It's working great.

I won't give any pictures, plenty of them elsewhere. I'll just help you get the thing running. After learning all there is to know about the board, it takes 30 minutes from start to finish to get XP and all drivers installed.

1. Download all the drivers from Intel. While you're at it, get the Technical Product Specification and Product Guide and read them.

2. Download the .iso file for updating the BIOS and burn it to CD.

3. Assemble your computer.

4. Boot from the BIOS boot disk and upgrade the BIOS. Please use a UPS when you do this, if you have a power flux or something, you could ruin your shiny new MB.

5. If you're using one SATA drive, it's still recommended to set the BIOS so the drive configuration is RAID. If you only have one SATA drive in the comptuer, don't expect to see the Intel Application Accelerator RAID Option ROM message, with a prompt to press control-I. Two or more drives are required before you see that. The advantage to configuring the BIOS to RAID with one drive is that if you should decide to create a RAID array, you can do so simply by adding a drive and creating the array. Choosing AHCI or IDE will require a system rebuild to make a RAID array. At least this is what I understand to be true.

6. Forget trying to use a USB floppy or flash drive for the RAID drivers. Download and learn to use nLite and slip stream the RAID drivers into a new XP install disk. nLite does much more too. It's a cool program. Slip stream only the ICH9R RAID or AHCI drivers. The other drivers on the floppy are for other devices.

7. After XP is installed, install your drivers. Besure to install .NET 2.0 BEFORE you install your ATI video drivers, otherwise you'll get errors on boot and you'll need to delete all the ATI drivers and software and reinstall them.

8. If you don't mind using the IDE drive BIOS configuration, you won't need the RAID drivers or the slip streamed XP disk. Keep in mind you'll be loosing the advantage of RAID or AHCI with this choice. I wouldn't do it if I were you.

Here's what I bought from Newegg.

ATI 100-505141 FireMV 2200 128MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card
Item #: N82E16814195023
$129.99
Good enough for what I do.

Intel BOXDP35DPM LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard
Item #: N82E16813121314
$124.99
5 stars - peachy board

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe 3.0GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E6850
Item #: N82E16819115028
$289.99
Seems plenty fast compared to my 6 year old 1.6 Athlon.

Acer AL1916WAbd Black 19" 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor
Item #: N82E16824009091
$359.98
not opened yet.

Antec Sonata III Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 500W Power Supply
Item #: N82E16811129024
$129.95
5 stars, Antec excellence. Won't want to hide this box.
The following 18" Vantec cable was perfect for connecting my IDE optical and hard disk to the IDE port. The drives were mounted at the top of the 5 1/4" bay. The hdd will be used for disk to disk backups.

VANTEC Clear 18" ATA 66/100/133 IDE Round Cable, 3-Connector Model CBL-100IDE18-CS
Item #: N82E16812104207
$6.49
fine cable

Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model KVR800D2N5K2/2G
Item #: N82E16820134117
$98.
Works, fast, no problems.