Best mATX conroe capable board for sensible money

Stephen B · 10 Mar 2007 at 16:42

peetee said:
^^ But the chip needs to boot @ 266 stock volts right?

sorry, yes

mine gets to 330 odd with default volts so 266 is a given really

peetee · 10 Mar 2007 at 16:44

mines a bit of a dud, 340s the highest i can push it, even with volts pumping through it

***F1ZZY*** · 12 Mar 2007 at 04:16

peetee said:
^^ But the chip needs to boot @ 266 stock volts right?

does your's?

peetee · 12 Mar 2007 at 10:47

im fairly sure it doesnt, no

Im planning on swapping out for a 6400 soon anyway.. Bit scared though, i also think my rams a bit dudd too.

Stephen B · 12 Mar 2007 at 11:02

peetee said:
im fairly sure it doesnt, no
Im planning on swapping out for a 6400 soon anyway.. Bit scared though, i also think my rams a bit dudd too.

well if thats true its the 1st instance I've heard of a 4300 being so poor, every post I've read here and on other forums paints an picture of e4300's reaching 3.0-3.2 with 1.4v, and 1.55 ish to get them to 3.6

I have 2, and both of them can manage over 300fsb on default volts in a shuttle of all places

peetee · 12 Mar 2007 at 13:25

Stephen B said:
well if thats true its the 1st instance I've heard of a 4300 being so poor, every post I've read here and on other forums paints an picture of e4300's reaching 3.0-3.2 with 1.4v, and 1.55 ish to get them to 3.6

I have 2, and both of them can manage over 300fsb on default volts in a shuttle of all places

nothin so suprising about a shuttle overclocking, brilliant CPU cooling to be honest. Yea, i can hit 3.0, but I cant seem to hit 266 on stock on my ds3..
My cpu runs awfully hot too, we're talking 70 under load when set @ 3.0

Stephen B · 12 Mar 2007 at 14:31

peetee said:
nothin so suprising about a shuttle overclocking, brilliant CPU cooling to be honest. Yea, i can hit 3.0, but I cant seem to hit 266 on stock on my ds3..
My cpu runs awfully hot too, we're talking 70 under load when set @ 3.0

something seems wrong there, when I run my [email protected] gig in shuttle with 1.525v, coretemp never gets to 75 full load, however its not exactly 100% stable

I'm running 3.0 gig in the shuttle atm actually, and it idles just under 40 degrees, and barely sees 60 degrees under full load

edit, apologies to op for going off topic, peetee if you want to discuss further start a new thread and I'm sure we can get to the bottom of it

peetee · 12 Mar 2007 at 17:49

im talking stock volts, i can hit 3.0 with 1.5 odd, and thats rock solid stable.
As far as im concerned any clock not stable is pointless, as it will start corrupting data & crash programs. Im happy enough with it now. Yea but back to the origional topic =)
sorry for the hijack

***F1ZZY*** · 13 Mar 2007 at 01:22

It's not that far off topic.

If best m-atx board is defined as overclocking board (which is what I think we all want) then if cpu mods facilitate this then ok.

I mean if by doing a BSEL pad/pin mod to a 4300, you can get 50% o/c 200 to 300 fsb, then great.

peetee · 13 Mar 2007 at 14:15

yea =) the mod kinda offers a solution while theres no decent overclocking boards, giving you a a hefty FSB overclock without having ram or chipset pushed too =)

Tute · 14 Mar 2007 at 21:31

WJA96 said:
I could get 350 on mine, but the place I got from had been bragging about how it was going to be a top overclocker. It wasn't actually any better than the boards I'd had before, so I sent it back.

In part exchange I got an ASRock 775i65 and an E4300 and guess what? It does 2.7Ghz without any voltage adjustments - totally stock, 300FSB (the boards maximum) using old DDR400 RAM. I got a 9800XT from MM and it's actually quite a respectable performer. With an X1950Pro in it, I'd say it would do for gaming too. Board, CPU, Graphics and RAM came to a grand total of £190 so I'm not complaining

Cheap and fast. I'd say that was what Gommsta was looking for when she started this thread?

Just noticed you posted this, must need my eyes looking at tbh.

So what were your experiences with the F-I90HD? Did you manage to get a reasonable overclock? Was it stable?

Most importantly, would you recommend it over the Asrock?

I'm having some really big problems with my Asrock board. I'm starting to think it's got something really serious against my SATA DVD drive, as it throws up all sorts of errors at boot every so often. :confused:

WJA96 · 14 Mar 2007 at 21:44

Tute said:
Just noticed you posted this, must need my eyes looking at tbh.

So what were your experiences with the F-I90HD? Did you manage to get a reasonable overclock? Was it stable?

Most importantly, would you recommend it over the Asrock?

I'm having some really big problems with my Asrock board. I'm starting to think it's got something really serious against my SATA DVD drive, as it throws up all sorts of errors at boot every so often.

I had an E6600 running at 3.15GHz, but after that it was like a wall: nothing after 350FSB. Some people are reporting better (375FSB, but not Orthos stable from the posts I've seen). It's not a bad board, just £80 is a lot for a board that doesn't overclock as well as a £65 one, just because I want to put it in a smaller box.

I've got a Lian Li PC-A05A now, and it's quite small. Not mATX small, but significantly smaller than a midi-size ATX case and much more flexible.

Rick_Barnes · 15 Mar 2007 at 02:09

such a shame, i had high hopes for this board.

still, its not a bad effort.

musx64 · 15 Mar 2007 at 06:45

I also had hopes for this board, I have got this on pre-order, either way I haven't lost any money on it. I thinking to test which one will be better then selling either the asrock or I will send back the Abit if it tends to be not that much of a performer.

Im not prepared to buy a mATX board for £70 + Delivery, when it does not perform as advertised. Now Im thinking it might be Fatal.

WJA96 · 15 Mar 2007 at 08:22

musx64 said:
I also had hopes for this board, I have got this on pre-order, either way I haven't lost any money on it. I thinking to test which one will be better then selling either the asrock or I will send back the Abit if it tends to be not that much of a performer.

Im not prepared to buy a mATX board for £70 + Delivery, when it does not perform as advertised. Now Im thinking it might be Fatal.

Why on pre-order? There are several UK suppliers with stock. The one that I bought mine from has had these for 3 weeks.

It's a good board to use with E4300's as you can do well over 3GHz with 350MHz and it does seem to be stable at the 350FSB upper limit, so it they modify the BIOS to give you 400 or 450, you could potentially go higher, later.

Rick_Barnes · 15 Mar 2007 at 17:08

3ghz is mint with any core2duo to be fair. Its not the best, but its hardly a slouch!

Looking forward to seeing the Fatality on MM

WJA96 · 15 Mar 2007 at 19:28

Rick_Barnes said:
Looking forward to seeing the Fatality on MM

It won't be mine - it wouldn't do 400FSB with my E6400 so it went straight back. That's what I had agreed with the etailer concerned. I got an E4300 and an ASRock 775i65 and that does 2.7GHz for a £30 motherboard. Better value.

musx64 · 16 Mar 2007 at 07:27

WJA96 said:
Why on pre-order? There are several UK suppliers with stock. The one that I bought mine from has had these for 3 weeks.

It's a good board to use with E4300's as you can do well over 3GHz with 350MHz and it does seem to be stable at the 350FSB upper limit, so it they modify the BIOS to give you 400 or 450, you could potentially go higher, later.

Because my local stockist's is a BullSh***** I did explain to to them it's already been released, can you believe they have 4 "techs" running around & not one knows what a cpu stepping is. :confused:

they say I should be getting it today.

WJA96 · 16 Mar 2007 at 07:37

musx64 said:
Because my local stockist's is a BullSh***** I did explain to to them it's already been released, can you believe they have 4 "techs" running around & not one knows what a cpu stepping is. they say I should be getting it today.

Ah. I used to like to buy from the OcUK store because I had had mail order issues (I've stopped even that now), but other than that I've found most etailers to be fine. Local stores are invariably awful in my experience. My local shops don't stock Intel Core2Duo's because they don't sell apparently. Too expensive to keep lying about. They will cheerfully order one in for me (3-5 working days) and charge me list for it, so I just go to the same supplier they use directly.

musx64 · 16 Mar 2007 at 21:21

Those blinkin T*****s have screwed my order up, apparently the boards still lying in distributers warehouse awaiting delivery to the wholesalers/shop.

Sod it - save the cash towards a gfx card, stick with the Asrock Conroe 945G DVI, awaiting some memory from another etailor, should get that on Saturday delivery, install my 6400 w/ my zalman cnps8000 hsf & icute "cloned" xqpack case.

I put some pics up soon.