I just bought a GA-EP35 DS3R mobo to go with my Q6600 cpu and Crucial PC-8500 DDR2 RAM.

The problem is it seems really slow. The bootup and just in general. I'm going to check out my BIOS settings but I thought this is a popular setup so if anyone is familiar with the startup and initial issues of this board and cpu (RAM, too, I gather), then it would be great if you could post your answers.

I think I just have to figure out what to do but I hope there's no internal problems with the board. I have read both good (positive) and bad (negative) things about the board but I suspect that there are always problems/issues to deal with when starting out.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations, advice and info!

Well, hard drive speed will certainly affect how responsive a system seems. If you've only got 1 or 2 GB of RAM, you'll speed things up by going to 3 or 4GB. Also, your CPU is only clocked at 2.4GHz, so it's not a super-fast CPU.

Nah, something is definitely wrong. It's not booting up the OS faster than either of my older systems (socket A and socket 9 mobo).

Perhaps, settings are not optimized? Anyone have an idea?

Did you figure out what the problem was?

(Obviously this isn't explained by the proc. being "just" 2.4 GHz.. kinda silly to call it a slow proc... 4 quad envy anybody?)

I'd be very interested in hearing how you solved this..