Intel DP55WB Media Series P55 micro-ATX Core i7 Core i5 LGA1156 Desktop Motherboard
intel Extreme series Single pack. NO FSB, P55 chipset, DDR3-1600, PCIe 2.0 x16, 0,1,5,10 & Matrix RAID,
“Good choice for a Child”
The I5 was perfect for a kid’s computer because the price was great.
Why buy the top of the line for a kid.
This works plenty well for a child’s PC.
“It is all about the memory!”
Let me preface this review by saying I have been building and messing with PCs for over 15 years now. This is my first motherboard actually manufactured by Intel themselves. I decided to choose this board because of the size, price, and the fact that I didn’t plan to overclock this system at all and figured this would be pretty close to a reference platform to use since it was manufactured by Intel. I was building a PC for my home theater and wanted stability and figured I did not need all the bells and whistles of a board meant for overclocking. I also liked the lack of legacy PS2 ports.
Like I said I decided to build a HTPC and had some parts laying around to start it off. I had a Geforce GTX280, hard drive, and case. I added this mobo, Corsair CMX4GX3M2A1600C9 XMS3 4 GB PC3-12800 Core i5 Memory Kit, Intel Core i5-750 CPU, and a OCZ 600W power supply. I planned to use the box for mainly streaming video and playing games using Steam so I did not add any optical drives. I have a PS3 that I used for Blu-ray playback.
The system was a easy build and I didn’t run into any major problems putting things together. You need to install the RAM first because the larger video cards are snug with the closed memory retention clips. I ran the SPDIF cable from the motherboard header to the video card with the cable that was included with the video card and it worked with no problem. The board has 3 Fan headers, 1 for the CPU and 2 for case fans. I used them all. When using a large video card like I did you loose a couple of SATA ports because the video card blocks them. If they had used angled plugs this would not be a problem. I only have a single drive so I just used a unblocked port so it wasn’t a major problem for me.
Once I got everything together the box powered up with no problems. I went into the BIOS and set the boot options for booting from a external USB drive I had and installed Windows 7. Here is a tip: Go download the network drivers using another PC and have them available to on a thumb drive once you get Windows installed. Windows 7 does not seem to have built in drivers for this NIC.
Once I got that up and running everything went fine… That is until I was watching a streaming video and the system rebooted. I let it restart and nothing seemed to be wrong with Windows. I started working on installing games from steam and the system rebooted again. So the recurring thing became random reboots every 15 to 30 minutes. I went into the BIOS and bumped the memory voltage to 1.65v which the memory was rated for and double checked that the timings were correct. I still had the same rebooting problem. I updated the BIOS using the F7 method described on the Intel site. I still had the same problem. I hit the search engines and forums looking for info and found that this mobo is very picky about what memory you put in it. The common theme was random reboots until they stuck memory in from the Intel approved list on the product page. So I ordered a couple of sticks of 2GB 1333MHZ Dimm DDR3. Once I put that in I had no further problems and the system has been rock solid. Of all my years in building a PC this is the first time that I have got a mobo that had to have memory from the manufacturers approved list.
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