I finished my round of rotating boards this weekend when I replaced the P5B in my bedroom HTPC with my primary system’s DS3.  All in all, it was a pretty painless ordeal.

The Asus P5Q vanilla appears to be a terrific board.  Perfectly stable so far and provided exactly what I was looking for on the overclocking front.  I initially had some issues getting it to post and found that it apparently hates my USB DVD reader.  After removing pretty much everything trying to track that down I was finally able to get it going.  No issues beyond that point.  I do have to get a better cooler for my quad, however.  For some reason, it’s just not handling the heat when under load anymore.  At idle, I’m at a respectable >40c for all cores.  When going under load with RipBot264 during the second pass, I noticed temps climbing into the <80c range.    I think I’ll probably pick up an OCZ Vendetta tomorrow, along with a Celeron 430.  The E1200 in my unRAID box could be put to better use, so I think I’m going to pop the 430 in there.   I have that P5B and 1GB DDR2 left over, so I want to do something with it.

The HTPC “upgrade” went well too.  I did find that two of my activity buttons on my Harmony 670 stopped working though.  I’m not sure why.  I can’t imagine it had anything to do with the hardware change, but that’s when they stopped working.  Weird, but not a show-stopper.  The biggest change is the ability for the system to actually enter and come out of standby by the remote now.  For some reason, both of the old 945P Asus (Asus only, maybe?) I used in my bedroom HTPC would not go into standby properly.  They would do a weird reboot and then be unusably sluggish upon reloading Windows.  I tried everything and it just never worked.  A little less noise at night and a few dollars saved on the electric bill is a good thing :)

The new Antec Three Hundred case is pretty nice.  Not as much room as what was in the ancient full tower Antec I was using, but a welcomed change nonetheless.  It definitely looks better.  The extra 160GB drive for my RAID 0 array also seems to add a little extra punch to my mux/demux operations.  I also decided to go back to Vista for this rebuild.  I’m starting to wish that I had gone with x64 so I could make use of the full 4GB of memory that I have now.  I just don’t know if all the encoding software I use fully supports it though.  Maybe I’ll get adventurous in the upcoming months.