C2D budget OCing.

[Kumagoro]

As the C2D E4300 will be out soon, allegedly end of January at $163 I'm wondering what cheap mobos there are which could take the thing to at least 3 GHz.

I plan to use DDR2 800 seeing as it only a few pennies above 667, 1 GB stick being £64 at scan or ebuyer.

Anyone any suggestions. Price wise I'm hoping for around £50 to £80 and nearer the £50 mark the better.

[fishboy25uk]

This may be a little cheap for your liking but it's good by all accounts. I think I've read these are fairly decent overclockers.

Asrock 775I945GZ

[Kumagoro]

If it does the job then I dont mind how cheap it is. I just expected to have to pay at least £50 to get something reasonable.

Thanks I will look into that one

[Flewis]

This board wont support ddr800 ram and the 945 chipset is not as good at overclocking as the 965 chipset.

Go for the gigabyte S3, at £67 it is extremely good value and a proven overclocker. It can take a 6300 to 3GHz so should do equally well with the 4300. The DS3 is £8 more and gives slightly better durability with better capacitors and RAID support.

[Kumagoro]

Cheers flewis,

My ideal minimum is to hit 3 GHz as cheap as possible hitting 3.5 GHz would be my most optimistic hopes.

So other than the 945 chipset which ones should I steer clear of?

Does anyone have any kind of rough hierarchy when it comes to chipsets. What sort of Ocing options am I looking to lose at various levels.

I suppose I'm looking for a smidgen of voltage control on the CPU + or - 0.2 V. Up to 400 MHz FSB would be nice so I could get to 3.6 GHz. Obviously locked PCI freqs etc.
RAM voltages I think for me are not that necessary.

Feature wise I dont think I have really high demands.

I would prefer full ATX to mATX, At least 4 Sata2 sockets, Im only ever likely to have a max of two HDD and Two optical drives, I will get sata optical drives so IDE isnt important. Obviously USB 2 and firewire headers too.


On board gpu no matter how crap would be useful for faulty GPU testing purposes. eSata would be a bonus, as would one gigabit ethernet port over standard. RAID i think isnt that important to me. SLI or Crossfire I'm never going to use.

So that should give me a reasonable amount of options right? I guess getting up to 400 MHz FSB is the more difficult thing?

[Flewis]

The intel 965 chipset is your best bet. The intel 975 is slightly better but more expensive. The nvidia 680 chipset is also very good but very expensive. All lower chipsets are probably best avoided as most of them dont support 800MHz RAM and will give you limited overclocking potential.

Remember that you can run graphics in software mode if your graphics card packs up so onboard graphics are a needless expense in most cases considering u can buy a cheap graphics card for £20 and will be better than onboard.

[Kumagoro]

Its driving me crazy this is, for just a few quid more you can get a better one, then for a few more quid on top of that you get and even better one hahaha does my head trying to control myself.

Its seem that there are no 965s under £60 apart from hard to find ones which don't seems like O'cers. Its seems the cheap OK ones are like you say the Gigabyte S3 or Biostar Tforce 965PT

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=448643

http://www.cclonline.com/product-inf...ufacturer_id=0

Im not sure if going for the more expensive DS3 is worth it, it doesnt seem to offer anything other than better other than caps and raid. Raid like I say I dont think I will use, £8 for caps hmm I think I would risk the cheap one.

How are these 965 board for future CPU upgrades? can they take Quad? I assume not.

[Clunk]

965 is ok with quad core.

From personal experience, avoid the DS3, it is awful, and possibly the worst motherboard that I have used.

[BlindMelon7]

Do the DFI boards live up to their rep when it comes to overclocking? If it was an AMD system I would recommend one (not that I've ever had one ).

[Kumagoro]

Clunk what made the DS3 to you awful? layout? Ocing options? stability? or anything eslse and would it apply to a standard S3?

I thought I read that DFI will be releasing something in the near future but they have nothing C2D now... right? I'm wondering what board will be coming out in the next month and if they will be better value then the two above.

[Clunk]

Clunk what made the DS3 to you awful? layout? Ocing options? stability? or anything eslse and would it apply to a standard S3?

I thought I read that DFI will be releasing something in the near future but they have nothing C2D now... right? I'm wondering what board will be coming out in the next month and if they will be better value then the two above.

Awful build quality.
The board bended badly when the cooler was fitted, moreso than any other board Ive seen (flimsy).
Awful bios.
Ram incompatabilities (may have been sorted now)
It would regularly go into an infinate loop of rebooting, which in turn killed other components.
Squeaking capacitors.
IDE controller problems.
USB problems.
SATA problems.
Ridiculously overpriced at £100 (thats what it was at the time)


And then it died.

[Clunk]

Do the DFI boards live up to their rep when it comes to overclocking? If it was an AMD system I would recommend one (not that I've ever had one ).

DFI do great overclocking boards, but unfortunately, they are another company that doesnt seem to take quality control or RMA turnround times seriously, especially for the prices they charge.

[Kumagoro]

Clunk what do you reckon S3 will be similar? I'm thinking so.

I think I may have even read something similar to what you wrote somewhere else. Makes me think its a common complaint.

[Clunk]

No idea mate, they are just my findings with the DS3, others seem to have had good experiences with them.

There were quite a lot of issues when it was a new board, but Im sure that they sorted a lot of them by now with bios updates, but some of the things that I didnt like were physical problems.

[Kumagoro]

I was told that on the OCUK website their E4300 price is
117 for the retail. the E6300 is listed as 111.

Ahh crap there goes my plan. I hope that pricing isnt right are they normally over or under anyone know.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/produc...id=6&subid=793

[Flewis]

that is just the inflated price cos its new, it will come down pretty quickly if u can wait that long. Give it about a week or two after it comes out.