What is the best Core 2 board?

[ooztuncer]

i used ds3 and the results are in my sig... 3.8ghz small fft's stable / 3.6ghz 24/7 run with 1.45 vcore with an e6400 on air.

 

now i have a p5b deluxe and still waiting for my phase - hopefully with my new e6600 i will be hoovering around 4+....

 

BUT, there is an itch behind my neck - telling me to buy abit's new ab9quad - it's only $182 from ewiz. The strap issue that thraxz mentioned above, is non-existent according to first reports... 525fsb on 1066 strap directly set it in bios (if you don't know, the only way to push 1066 strap on earlier 965 boards was booting at 400fsb, then using clockgen in windows to increase fsb)...

 

whatever you select, as i mentioned earlier in other threads, if you DON'T have a good (very good indeed) cooling system, don't bother investing your $$$ to high end mobo/cpu/ram...

[Smoken Joe]

Smoken Joe: I was just curious as to whether the 975 chipset likes a particular CPU as that is what I thought OsamaBinAthlon+ was getting at.

 

I had a look at the E4300 as you suggested & it does seem to make a good over clock here are good UK prices.

 

E6300 1.86GHZ 1066MHZ 2M Cache £120

E6400 2.13GHZ 1066MHZ 2M Cache £150

E6600 2.4GHZ 1066MHZ 4M Cache £215

 

E4300 1.8GHZ 800MHZ 2M Cache £110

 

 

On a budget I would get the E4300 - even without a budget it sounds like a good idea as long as you you may not get the same overclock. The 6600 is a safer bet but you wont be getting twice the performance for almost twice the price. For a lot of people the percent of overclock is certainly better on them and that is fun by itself!

 

 

Look at this test with a DS3 http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2903&p=2

[Touchline]

While I do not claim this to be the best Core2 I will just throw a 650i board into the mix for consideration.

I came very close to getting the 975x/g at $164 but finally decided to give the Asus P5N-E SLI a go instead. So far I am very pleased with the results. I would call it an enthusiast's board because there are a number of things required for getting the most out of this board.

Such things as putting a 38x38x10mm heatsink on the SB (it does not come with a heatsink); putting a fan on the stock NB heatsink as it comes passive and overclocking will heat it up very quickly; installing good HSF on the CPU (stock Intel is not bad but for high stable overclocks better is recommended); good DDR2 PC6400 ram (I over did it here but I plan to keep this ram for future use); using the black dimms instead of the yellow dimm slots (for some reason the black dimm slots recieve better consistent voltage). There are memory holes in the 202 bios but just by avoiding these this bios does good...the beta 401 is beginning to get good results for some but I have no need to change yet.

The board is proving to be a very good stable gaming board for use with high overclocks...above 33%. Some are claiming 100+% stable overclocks with the E6300 and E6400. I am using an E6600 currently running at 3.3GHz (9*367, 800MHz memory frequency running 5-5-4-12, 2T, timinings) which is somewhere above a 35% overclock and playing games such as FEAR, Oblivion, and Dark Messiah with no problems. I can boot into windows at 9*400 for 3.6GHz but no stability. I have a heat problem with the NB with voltage over 1.39v so I have ordered a HR-05 SLI heatsink that I hope will give me the extra cooling for better stability. It seems to have worked for some.

[newguy]

good pick touchline, I will swap my P5B-e to P5N-e SLI in this week too. Hope that it clock better, cause my P5B-e is the C1 version so the Vdimm only 2.1v max; 3600MHz rock stable but both CPU & ram still have lots of headroom to go. So let's see what next.

[momoceio]

In this article they're running both the e6300 and e4300 at 3.5ghz..well the e4300 is 3.4something but still....thats about a 95% overclock! Plus it's all done on Air cooling with a Thermalright Ultra-120 with a 120mm fan.

 

http://www.techspot.com/review/40-core2-e4...0-overclocking/

[Angry_Games]

In this article they're running both the e6300 and e4300 at 3.5ghz..well the e4300 is 3.4something but still....thats about a 95% overclock! Plus it's all done on Air cooling with a Thermalright Ultra-120 with a 120mm fan.

 

http://www.techspot.com/review/40-core2-e4...0-overclocking/

 

what they aren't telling you is that it is probably not a good idea to run those chips at 3500Mhz on air for longer than it took for them to boot up and do those benchmarks (I've used an XP-120 on both 6600 and 6400 and there's no way I'd stay at 3500Mhz on either chip with just an air cooler...)

[lugie]

what they aren't telling you is that it is probably not a good idea to run those chips at 3500Mhz on air for longer than it took for them to boot up and do those benchmarks (I've used an XP-120 on both 6600 and 6400 and there's no way I'd stay at 3500Mhz on either chip with just an air cooler...)

 

What kind of temps were you seeing Angry?

 

I'm currently priming at 3.65, loading at 49-51C(CPU), and 50-52C NB.

 

granted I'm on water, but I'm only running a GTS120(rad) at the moment.

[Angry_Games]

there's a pretty significant difference between watercooling and air cooling at those speeds/voltages

 

Everyone in these forums so far (and most other forums) are hitting mid-to-upper 70's or higher on even the best air cooling

 

I've yet to see anyone do 3600Mhz in a REAL environment (ie not ducting freezing winter air in etc) without hitting 70C or higher, and that is simply too high for prolonged periods.

 

you simply cannot compare watercooling to air cooling in this situation.

[momoceio]

Do you run a water cooling setup? Would something like the Nautilus 500 or Gigabyte 3D Galaxy II be sufficient to keep it cooled? I don't think I'll be overclocking much past 3.1~3.2 but you never know.

[Guest ElAguila]

I have the P5N-E SLI with the 650i chipset right now and I am very happy with it. I had an msi p965 platinum and was greatly disappointed. Right now I am running at 9x345 with the memory unlinked. I have the ram running at 1020MHz. I am completely stable. Temps with my ninja are 43C at full load on both cores and the NB temp is at 36C loaded. I have a custom cooler on it. My hr-05 sli cooler wouldn't fit with the ninja and my 8800gts so I went with a coolermaster blue ice pro. I am kind of biased towards this board because I came from an amd nf590 board and i like the way the nvidia chipsets work but this board does offer many oc options that just aren't in the other boards.

[Pihrana]

Well, Ive just this weekend ditched my old DFI LANPATY UT NF4 SLI-D, Athlon 64 X2 4400+, with 4x512Mb Sticks OCZ Value VX series Memory due to not being able to get the god damn thing ORTHOS stable !!!

 

I moved to E6400 Core 2 Duo, teamed up with the Brilliant ASUS P5N-E SLI motherboard. I did masses of research as i always do before buying things, and all i can say is so far so impressed. OK, i havent pushed up the clocks yet but at least im now PRIME/ORTHOS stable at default clocks, which i never did manage on the DFI board.

 

If anyone is thinking about what board to buy then this is the one for the best Price/Performance Ratio right now. I also considered the Gigabyte Q mobo that has been mentioned in various posts of this thread, but it was a good £25 more expensive......

 

So if your still not convinced about the ASUS P5N-E SLI then go read these reviews.......

 

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html...W50aHVzaWFzdA==

 

http://www.neoseeker.com/resourcelink.html?rlid=144302

 

http://www.neoseeker.com/resourcelink.html?rlid=144323

 

http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.asp...cleid=925&cid=3

 

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2894&p=1

 

http://techgage.com/article/asus_p5n-e_sli

 

http://vr-zone.com/?i=4450

 

I will of course be upgrading my Siggy and posts to let everyone know how far i manage to push this baby !!

[Spring2188]

yep I have the $109 Gigabyte GA-965P-S3

 

it only has a single PCI-E 16x slot, but if you have a big vid card, you only need a single slot (like an 8800, or dual-gpu card etc)

 

It overclocks like a dream, very easy (see the OCDB)

 

The DQ6 is all that the S3 is and more (dual pci-e slots for Crossfire or hacked SLI lol).

 

 

This is the only non-DFI motherboard I've played with really in the last 4 years, and I love it. But we'll be playing with a lot more as time goes on! (ExRoadie is getting an MSI 965 version like mine, cheapo but should overclock like crazy for normal users).

 

 

ps: dont listen to Thraxz about the 965 being a poor performer. He's on crack. The 965 board I have performs awesome! And it only has an older 7800GT 256MB card in it!

 

 

Angry are you using active cooling on the northbridge HS, from what I've read it gets extremely hot. And I'm getting ready to assemble my new rig using the DS3. Did you replace the TIM with AS5?