£200 Pound sterling, which cpu/mobo combo?

sedj · 13 Mar 2006 at 23:08

Ok chaps

Looking to upgrade from my socket a platform to 754/939 but currently my head is mashed with the various problems relating to certain mobos.

The asrock dual stata looks a tad shacky and the nforce3 platform does not appear to like nvidia 6 series cards which i have. I will deffo be overclocking whatever i get, but heres what i have now (2 years old):

Duron Applebred 1.6 @ 2.0
Epox 8krdae
Twinmoss PC3200 1GB Vanilla
Nvidia 6800LE unlocked to 6800

Im not fussed about sata or firewire or pcie for at least the next 12 month, i just want to get some real horse power to run CS:S among other things windows based.

Bearing in mind my ram is a tad not too clever, with one chip it has seen 210fsb but with both installed it does not like going above 180fsb. But runs all day stable at 180, will this be a major problem ?

What i want is a board that is not limited too much on ramming volts through the cpu unlike the asrock and it has to be pretty stable and CHEAP. Im not asking much am i ?

I will be using the Freezer 64 pro thats for sure and was looking at the 3000 - 3500 venice processors unless an oppty is within grasp?

What would you do?

Cheers

geeza · 14 Mar 2006 at 00:18

dfi ultra-d board £93

shop around for an opteron 146 at about £115 then clock it to FX57 speeds
(putting it on a 150 divider to keep the memory at 200mhz)

its £10 or £15 more but i think itll hold its own for the money

smids · 14 Mar 2006 at 01:01

That's PCI-E though, even though good advice if he went that route.

ajgoodfellow · 14 Mar 2006 at 01:51

Look at the Via K8T800 Pro chipsets for Socket 939 AGP

Something like the ABit AV8 or the ASUS A8V Rev 2 (very important you get the Rev 2 as the Rev 1 doesn't have AGP/PCI locks so very limited when overclocking)

I'd be tempted to wait until Socket M2 as this is only a few months off

The ASRock can be a little shacky but when set up its said to be fine. It does have the major advantage that you can cheaply upgrade your graphics card

How about:

MB-053-AB Abit AV8 3RD Eye VIA K8T800 Pro (Socket 939) Motherboard (MB-053-AB)
£54.95 £54.95
CP-141-AM AMD Opteron UP 144 San Diego 1.8GHz 1MB Cache (Socket 939) - Retail (CP-141-AM)
£109.95 £109.95
Subtotal £164.90
VAT £28.86
Total £193.76

The Opteron chips are great overclockers and fast chips at stock. I'd also be tempted to shop around for the 146 as this has a 10X multiplier aiding overclocking

sedj · 14 Mar 2006 at 09:06

Thanks for the advise , i would wait for M2 but i dont think theres much chance of these boards supporting agp?

I'll have a mooch round for prices on the opptys.

Cheers

helpimcrap · 14 Mar 2006 at 09:29

if you want an AGP mobo id say without doubt the Asus A8V rev2. mine was an awesome clocker! ran my winnie at about 280mhz fsb no problem.

geeza · 14 Mar 2006 at 10:20

i wouldnt advise getting an agp/pci-e board combo. I was going to do this and instead went for the board I have now. I was told that boards like the AS rock duel are 'jack of all trades' boards, which I suppose they are. Personally id wait and make a change over to pci-e