Best C2D mobo for overclocking?

ledbythereaper · 6 Nov 2006 at 12:35

what's the difference though between the DS4 and DQ6 in terms of overclockability and performance?

Topgun · 6 Nov 2006 at 13:38

I would add to the list of good p965 boards the Biostar Tforce p965 deuluxe. I have mine over 500fsb with the latest BIOS. Costs around £90 though so not particularly cheap or easy to get hold of.

Rick_Barnes · 6 Nov 2006 at 18:21

WJA96 said:
What do we know about NVidia BIOS's? - they are not that good for overclocking.

Kinda disagree, not had much experiance on intel platforms, but for a long time, Nforce 2 boards were king of Athlon XP overclocking, and Nforce 4 Boards king of Athlon 64s!

WJA96 · 6 Nov 2006 at 19:56

Rick_Barnes said:
Kinda disagree, not had much experiance on intel platforms, but for a long time, Nforce 2 boards were king of Athlon XP overclocking, and Nforce 4 Boards king of Athlon 64s!

Well, the P5ND2SLi was pretty poor, the P5NSLi is pretty poor, all the P5N32SLi's are pretty poor - so the recent Intel track record isn't great I'm afraid. If they use the same BIOS structure (and we don't know they will) then the chances are, it may not be a great clocker.

Topgun · 6 Nov 2006 at 21:31

WJA96 said:
Well, the P5ND2SLi was pretty poor, the P5NSLi is pretty poor, all the P5N32SLi's are pretty poor - so the recent Intel track record isn't great I'm afraid. If they use the same BIOS structure (and we don't know they will) then the chances are, it may not be a great clocker.

I think it's a hardware limitation rather than something to do with the BIOS. Otherwise one of the Intel-Nvidia board manufactuers would have nailed it by now.

Rick_Barnes · 7 Nov 2006 at 00:24

guess we'll see in a few days!!

WJA96 · 7 Nov 2006 at 06:04

Yep. These 'fantasy motherboard overclock' threads are great aren't they?

Some poster is wetting himself at the thought of the unlaunched board - "That's the board I'm ordering tomorrow/next week/next month as despite not having seen any reviews I KNOW it will be the fastest, best clocking etc. motherboard ever made and it will allow FSB600 overclocks with no skill and it will allow buffoon overclockers to ignore the laws of physics"

Some other poster (usually me) has downloaded the manual from the website and discovered that the BIOS screenies in the manual show that it doesn't even have a manual FSB setting. This is posted, but Wet Pants will have none of it - 20 years ago, this company released a motherboard that allowed you to clock a 6502 to the stars - well, 2MHz at least. That's all the trach record he needs to be shelling out £200+VAT on launch day.

Sometime later....

Wet Pants (by now extremely wet as he defecated in his underwear with excitement when the board arrived) has discovered he doesn't know how to update the BIOS because floppy drives are old fashioned and he wouldn't have one in the house. He's also discovered that RAID 0 on one 36Gb Raptor isn't allowed for some reason and his board won't boot because it expects you to have normal RAM, not something made for mental overclockers with urine coloured heatsinks and it will take the support department of DFBitSUSRock about 3 months to figure out what the problem is, by which point the new wonder board is out and he's posting "That's the board I'm going to buy" again.

And everyone else who just bought the Intel Badaxe 2 is smiling because Intel were never going to release a crappy untested product on launch day, were they? :rolleyes:

All characters in this story are fictional.

WJA96 · 7 Nov 2006 at 06:13

Topgun said:
I think it's a hardware limitation rather than something to do with the BIOS. Otherwise one of the Intel-Nvidia board manufactuers would have nailed it by now.

Sorry, I was imprecise - the chipset is the BIOS is the chipset. You phone up NVidia and you say - can I have x thousand units of the Northbridge/Southbridge combo and can you e-mail me the BIOS so I can put my logo on it?

The BIOS is our control interface to the chipset, so yes, it's probably something like 2.1V is the maximum the chipset hardware is capable of, so 2.1V is the maximum allowable BIOS value.

My big concern (and I really do hope it's unjustified) is that most of the Core2Duo motherboards have been rehashes of existing designs and have been subject to the same limitations as the existing designs. For 680, NVidia might have completely redesigned the whole kit and caboodle, but I do rather doubt it unfortunately. Whatever the real outcome, my money is staying firmly in my pocket until a few OcUK users have reported back actual findings.

Rick_Barnes · 8 Nov 2006 at 23:32

rrrg oops

Rick_Barnes · 8 Nov 2006 at 23:32

WJA96 said:
My big concern (and I really do hope it's unjustified) is that most of the Core2Duo motherboards have been rehashes of existing designs and have been subject to the same limitations as the existing designs.

so what do you think now?

WJA96 · 9 Nov 2006 at 05:20

WJA96 said:
Whatever the real outcome, my money is staying firmly in my pocket until a few OcUK users have reported back actual findings.

Angilion · 12 Nov 2006 at 16:06

A couple more that might bear consideration:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2871&p=1

VeNT · 12 Nov 2006 at 16:41

meh
to be honest I've bought two whole systems last month
ones E6300 and DS4
other is E6300 and DS3
both clocked to 450x7 at stock. ram at 900 (geil ultra low laitancy)
rock stable, I've had the DS4 system booting at 460 fsb at stock aswell but it wasn't as stable so I went back,

ledbythereaper · 20 Dec 2006 at 22:28

Ordered a E6300, P5B-D and 1GB of OCZ PC6400 (You where out of Geil

) Buying case and other things after Xmas