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I am planning on selling my current cpu/mobo and an old gfx card for some cash and upgrade to a 165 next month. I will be keeping my 1gb Geil Value ram though.
Out of these boards which is best? I haven't o/c much before mind.
Abit AN8 SLi
Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe
DFI LanParty UT NF4 SLI-D
Max budget is £120.
Also how much will my ram hold me back? Thanks :)
For a standard overclock any of those boards will do just fine, will you be using the SLi feature?
Unless you are a seriously hardcore, you won't notice any difference. I own the DFI, I hear the ASUS is also good. The DFI has its pcie ports in different places to the ASUS, which was my reason for getting it.
Nox
Your ram won't hold back in the slightest. Ram limiting overclocks is a throwback to the Athlon XP days where there was a massive performance hit if you didn't run the ram 1:1. With Athlon 64's if you don't have memory that clocks well then its better to just run it at a divider to keep it at stock speeds while you get the cpu mhz as high as possible.
Running a divider against 1:1 at high overclocks makes only a few % difference while the price of performance ram is often twice the price. You'd notice a much bigger difference with 2gb of value ram than 1gb of performance ram.
Edit: And my votes for motherboards:
Top overclock >300mhz htt with some work - DFI
Fair overclock ~300mhz htt without too much work - Asus
Not really sure about the abit board but I don't think its quite as good as the other two (although I think it is cheaper)
Are you going sli? If not consider the the non sli dfi, I will throw epox into the ring also, great boards, stable and great pricesQuote:
Originally Posted by aphex
They've been to 400HTT, 300 should be easily achievable with half decent components.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Horse
If you get the regular AN8 SLI (not the Fatality) it's the quietest of the 3 if that plays any part in the decision making process.
Thanks for the replies. I won't be using SLi when I get my mobo but it is nice to have that extra feature I guess. The non SLi DFI is only like £17 cheaper so might as well I guess :p
From what I've read the DFI seems to have like a million options in BIOS! Will it be hard for a person with limited o/c experience to get decent settings?
And yeah I forgot to mention I'd prefer a quiet board, do the small fans on the DFI/Abit/Epox make a lot of noise?
Atm seems like they are all tied still lol with the Abit slightly ahead cos its more quiet.
edit: also will probably be getting a Scythe Ninja but am I right in assuming all the boards will fit this?
The fans on the chipet can be noisey, my dfi was and the epox is getting the same way as my old nf7-s abit, noisey at start, it all depends what other noise you have in the case. It is very easy to replace it with a passive zalman, but will require some modding on the dfiQuote:
Originally Posted by aphex
Epox and DFI fan is in no way quiet. Grab the Abit if you're not hard core. And stay away from the DFI if you don't really in to ocing, it does have like million of settings in there and take lots of time to experiement.
Cant fault the Abit AN8-SLi i own, has been to 282HTT no problem. Probably would have gone higher if i had lowered my x11 cpu multiplier. The silent heatpipe cooling works
well.
Hear good and bad things about all brands of mobo, just buy from a reputable retailer which has a good returns policy in case of a fault.
Thanks guys I think I will go with the Abit :)
If you willing to spend 2 weeks tweaking the DFI board sure get one. After the 2 weeks you'll get the maximum out of your rig. It will probably take 2 days on other boards to get them working properly. It is really a b1tch to get the DFI board working. But once you get it right it OWNZ!
If you haven't got it set in stone yet, my Asus is amazing, its incredibly stable, really easy to overclock, the BIOS is incredibly easy to use and to flash, it has stacks of features and the manuals superb. I wouldn't go anywhere else.