There were no problems whatsoever with the installation. It was, in fact, the easiest/fastest/best installation I have ever gone through. Every other machine I've put together has had some sort of catastrophe associated with it. For instance, the previous build featuring a Gigabyte GA-K8N SLI Ultra motherboard and dual eVGA 6800GTs. Being that I use the same case for every machine, I hadn't taken out the old PSU used for the EPoX nForce3 Ultra board before installing the Gigabyte board. The old PSU was insufficient since it had no PCIe power connectors and only had a single 12v rail. Upon realizing the old PSU was still in, I found out that I couldn't remove/replace it because of the motherboard was blocking about 1/8th of an inch of the PSU from getting out. So everything had to be removed. The PSUs could be switched and then everything had to be re-situated.
Inside case after installation
It was a stupid error on my part, but it has left a lasting impression on me. To say I'm apprehensive every time a machine is put together would be an understatement. Thankfully, this one had no issues or setbacks at all. In about an hour I had replaced the Gigabyte board with the K9N SLI Platinum. The 4600+ was in its throne next to 2GB of SuperTalent 800MHz DDR2 and an MSI NX7900GT. The full machine specs are listed below:
One thing still bothering me quite a bit is that there is only one IDE channel. I know that SATA is the future and all, but still, by only giving a single channel, that basically cuts out any use of IDE hard drives. Most users have two IDE CD-RW/DVD-RW drives since the SATA flavors really have not taken off. In order to use both of those, any IDE hard drives that were being used before must be sacrificed. Luckily I have a Raptor as my main drive and therefore this was not a huge issue. But it did make my old Maxtor 60GB drive useless until I buy an external enclosure.
I can't speak for everyone on this, but I find the inclusion of a FDD controller instead of a second IDE to be a bit of a confusing move. I have not used a floppy disk in at least 6 years and cannot say I know anyone who still does actively use them. USB thumb drives eclipsed the floppy years ago. Even for installing RAID drivers, most everyone I know that actually needs them have created a slipstream installation of Windows so that there is no need for a floppy disk at all. And a lot of those people are not hardcore gamers or techies.
Other things to note are that the capacitors around the CPU socket/bracket are pretty close to the bracket. If considering this board for use with an aftermarket cooling solution, MAKE SURE THE HEATSINK WILL FIT ON THE BOARD!
