PC dead, options?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Well after my msi motherboard died for no obsious reason I'm not really sure I want to go that route again.
Which it why I've been looking at Asus and gigabyte

If you want Crossfire and/or SLI the Z68 motherboards are £110 to £120 it seems.

The CPUs in your price-range are a Core i3 2100,Phenom II X4 955BE or a Phenom II X6 1075T if you want a decent motherboard.

[Behemoth]

If it helps, I haven't made this common knowldge on the forum but I've been playing around with my bios and Overclocking of my current CPU (Phenom 2 X2 555 BE) and I've got it to unlock it's other two cores and overclock to 3.86 GHz, I reckon if I had a better cooler than my Artic Cooling Freezer Pro 2 and if my RAM can take it, it'll hit 4 GHz with no real head ache.

[Bagnaj97]

I have heard some noise about the northbridge on the Gigabyte motherboard running a tad hot. Both the 970 based motherboards I mentioned are pretty decent.

From what I read online before I bought my board it seems hot running northbridges and/or VRMs were the fault of some badly fitted heatsinks across gigabyte's 9xx chipset range. Easily remedied by reseating the HS and some new goop. I can't for the life of me find the link now though

[Bagnaj97]

Well after my msi motherboard died for no obsious reason I'm not really sure I want to go that route again.
Which it why I've been looking at Asus and gigabyte

Apparently MSI went through a phase of using substandard VRMs on their AMD boards, perhaps it was across their Intel boards too and this is what got you? If you go the AMD route then this link should help you pick a motherboard with good VRMs so you can overclock without worrying about power.

[Pob255]

Yes there where a lot of Msi AMD failiers, esp when overclocking.
Which I'm not surrpraised at as the MSi AMD boards where cheap lower end boards and Phenom's are quite power hungry esp when overclocking them.

However the p55-gd65 has had a far better rap.
The main thing I can find about a VRM failier on a P55-GD65 is this thread http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/sho...php?t=18283886
However it was 2nd hand and he was running a rather high overclock (I think 4ghz was mentioned)

No sign of VRM death on my board and no brunt contact points on the cpu. I need to get it fully tested with a different cpu & ram just to rule everything out.

I've got my system temporarily up and running, a Zotac 9300 mini-ITX (which has only one working ram slot & only 2 usb ports working) a C2D e7200 and 1gb of ram
A mini-itx board looks really silly in my case, esp with a gtx260 plugged into it, it would of been sillier as I originally fitted a Scythe Mine cooler my the OCZ reaper ram just wouldn't fit with it so I had to go back to the stock cooler.

Message to UseItNow, your mail box is full, to answer you question Yes I'm interested, but could you come down in price a bit as I could get it retail for only £28 less
I don't care about the cooler but retail would include the full warranty

[Pob255]

Ok I've been hunting round and I'm just digging my self deeper into indecision

Most of the lower cost Z68 boards I've looked at are just not very inspiring, The one that has attacted me is the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4 which seem to have a very robust VRM but it's £145
Which means I'd have to push my budget to even get an i3, which I'd not be able to overclock anyway, so is that level of VRM needed?
I could go for the lower end £80ish area with something like the Asus P8Z68-V LX (although I'm rather wary of the low end asus boards) which would be affordable but the weak VRM's are going to be a major limit if I get a k cpu later and want to overclock.

Looking at BullDozer it's not looking great esp with the PhenomII's still around, a phenomII x4 955 for around £90
Then ether an 870 motherboard for around £70-75 or the Asus M5A99X EVO which has caught my eye for £100 it seems like a blinder
that would also give me the option to drop down to a phenomII x2, around £65 which means I could also get some better ram.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Ok I've been hunting round and I'm just digging my self deeper into indecision

Most of the lower cost Z68 boards I've looked at are just not very inspiring, The one that has attacted me is the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4 which seem to have a very robust VRM but it's £145
Which means I'd have to push my budget to even get an i3, which I'd not be able to overclock anyway, so is that level of VRM needed?
I could go for the lower end £80ish area with something like the Asus P8Z68-V LX (although I'm rather wary of the low end asus boards) which would be affordable but the weak VRM's are going to be a major limit if I get a k cpu later and want to overclock.

Looking at BullDozer it's not looking great esp with the PhenomII's still around, a phenomII x4 955 for around £90
Then ether an 870 motherboard for around £70-75 or the Asus M5A99X EVO which has caught my eye for £100 it seems like a blinder
that would also give me the option to drop down to a phenomII x2, around £65 which means I could also get some better ram.

This 970 motherboard has the same VRM section as the 990X you are looking at:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-%28x16%29-atx

You can get it for around £80 if you shop around. Another mate has it like I said before and it looks reasonably decent. Anyway,he will be overclocking an unlocked Athlon II X3 on it next week so I can ask him how he fares with it.

The thing is that Aria have some very good prices for AMD parts ATM. You can get the Asus 970 motherboard,Phenom II X4 955BE and a free copy of DiRT3 for around £172 delivered.

Regarding the socket 1155 motherboards,if you don't intend to really overclock this one looks good:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-%28x16%29-atx

You could get a Core i5 2300 and the total will be around £220. As long as the RAM can run at 1.5V to 1.58V and 1333MHZ it should be fine.

If you are going for a single card setup though and want overclocking this P67 motherboard looks relatively decent:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-%28x16%29-atx

These Z68 motherboards are cheaper than the one you are looking at currently:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...a-on-board-atx

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=3850#ov

[Noxvayl]

I'd personally favour getting a 970 motherboard with a X2 CPU and better ram, that way you have a great platform for any bulldozer fixes that could(probably not) come out and possibly Piledriver, as long as it uses the AM3+ socket. You also get a better chipset in my opinion.

[Pob255]

The thing about the Bulldozer seem to be it's lack of FPU with only one shared by each module, games and 3d work suffer as both have heavy floating point calculation loads.

The M5A97 PRO does have the same VRM, it does lack the heatpipe linking the northbridge and VRM heat sinks.
For a single card it's very good for dual card's it's not, while it can do crossfire the 2nd slot is only x4

I don't like the Asus Z68 boards, the vrm heatsinks are way too close to the cpu socket.
I'd not trust the Asus P8P67 LE for overclocking

[Pob255]

I'm leaning toward the AMD atm, question is PhenomII X2 555 + 4gb 1600mhz ram or a PhenomII X4 955 and stick with my current unbranded 4gb 1333mhz ram?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The M5A97 PRO does have the same VRM, it does lack the heatpipe linking the northbridge and VRM heat sinks.
For a single card it's very good for dual card's it's not, while it can do crossfire the 2nd slot is only x4

You were mentioning 870 motherboards for around £70 to £75 which cannot do 8X/8X Crossfire or SLI and TBH the M5A97 PRO is better than them. For example one of my mates has the ASUS M4A87TD EVO too which was one of the best 870 motherboards and the M5A97 PRO is much better IMHO as is the equivalent Gigabyte.

I don't like the Asus Z68 boards, the vrm heatsinks are way too close to the cpu socket.
I'd not trust the Asus P8P67 LE for overclocking

What about this Gigabyte I mentioned:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/gigab...-%28x16%29-atx

It has a 12 phase VRM unlike the 16 phase VRM of the UD4 but for Sandy Bridge I would think the former would be fine. The UD4 does have bigger VRM heatsinks but the UD3 heatsinks are not exactly small.

I only made the suggestion for the Asus P8P67 LE, because you could get a Core i5 2300 and the LE seems to have at least some VRM cooling too and more connections. Like I said it would be more for running at stock speeds anyway.

I'm leaning toward the AMD atm, question is PhenomII X2 555 + 4gb 1600mhz ram or a PhenomII X4 955 and stick with my current unbranded 4gb 1333mhz ram?

I know the unlock rate of early Phenom II X2 550BE and 555BE CPUs was decent but I cannot say if this is the case now. With relatively recent Athlon II X3 CPUs friends have bought I know that one unlocked to a Phenom II X4 with L3 cache,another unlocked to an Athlon II X4 and another did not unlock but has hit 4GHZ even though it has a locked multiplier. Newer Phenom II X4 CPUs are also meant to hit 4GHZ much easier than before and some have reached 4.4GHZ to 4.5GHZ IIRC(probably not the norm) although YMMV.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Pob your inbox is full!!

[kalniel]

The thing about the Bulldozer seem to be it's lack of FPU with only one shared by each module, games and 3d work suffer as both have heavy floating point calculation loads.

But you get four modules in a Bulldozer desktop chip - there are very few Intel desktop chips with more than four cores. Think of Bulldozer as a four core chip with a better version of hyperthreading for Int pipelines and you're not too far out. The problem is more the longer instruction pipeline which means it's less powerful per clock compared to Phenom and Intel. When the yield improves they should be able to ramp up the clockspeed.

[Pob255]

Sorry, it's got space now

I was just about to click confirm on
4GB (2x2GB) Corsair Vengeance Blue DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600), NonECC Unbuffered, CAS 9-9-9-24, XMP, 1.5V
Asus M5A99X EVO, AMD 990X, S AM3+, DDR3, SATA III - 6Gb/s, RAID SATA, PCIe 2.0 (x16), ATX
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black, Deneb Core, S AM3, 3.2GHz, 8MB Cache, HT 3600MHz, 125W, Retail
Total £211.66

I want the 990x EVO over the 970 Pro for the extra Sata ports and pci-e x4 slot, one or both of which will be used in my future plans.

But I'll hold on for your reply

But you get four modules in a Bulldozer desktop chip - there are very few Intel desktop chips with more than four cores. Think of Bulldozer as a four core chip with a better version of hyperthreading for Int pipelines and you're not too far out. The problem is more the longer instruction pipeline which means it's less powerful per clock compared to Phenom and Intel. When the yield improves they should be able to ramp up the clockspeed.

yes but the problem with that is that the FX81xx are the 4 module cpu and that's £160+ when a phenomII x4 is half the cost, the FX4100 is only a dual module cpu but £90
Which is why I'm not going the BD route for now.

[Behemoth]

Nice choice on parts there mate You won't be disappointed by it thats for sure

[Noxvayl]

Agreed, top quality components. Strange how the blue memory is cheaper than the black when they seem to be the same(besides colour).