Question : Problem: New Barebone Question

Hello.

I've recently bought a brand new ASUS Pundit P1-PH1 Barebone PC with a Pentium 4 3.2GHz and 1GB PC5300 DDR2 RAM. I've built it, but I've come across the following problems/issues:

1. The Seagate 80GB SATA drive comes with a jumper set to limit the drive speed to 1.5GB/s. Removing the jumper, which sets the drive to 3GB/s, results in drive operations become twice as slow! The system board only supports SATA, not SATA II. Is this the cause or could it be something else?

2. The power LED on the onboard LAN port doesn't work, although the data transfer LED does. Still, I can get a decent network connection. Is this something to be worried about?

3. I've applied a thin layer of heatsink compound to the ASUS CPU fan base; not too thick, but also not too thin so that you can see through it. However the fan speed/noise fluctuates all the time after a very small increase in CPU load. The RPM spikes from 1200 to 2500 rpm all the time and it is quite noisey. Currently the CPU temperature is 42 degrees C and the motherboard is 52 degress C. Is this OK? Another thing are there any fans I can use that will keep the CPU cool and the noise levels down, or is the fluctuations being caused for a reason?

4. The hard drive gets extremely hot after about 15 minutes; so hot that I can't even hold it for more than a second! Is this right?

Any help on these issues would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Dave

Answer : Problem: New Barebone Question

with all those problems, i would return the board asap for a warranty replacement . . .