Best sub £100 motherboard

thecremeegg

thecremeegg

thecremeegg

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Joined
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As above really, for an e6400 chip - im thinking p35 is the way to go, but not sure which board.
I want to AVOID having onboard Soundmax and realtek if possible, they cause me no end of problems

Cheers
 
The OcUK IP35-Pro is a serious bargain at £59 on this week only, but you must update the BIOS to V1.3. The board is very well put together with negligible Vdroop and it has extremely robust recovery for failed overclocking and bad BIOS flashing. They have fixed the disk subsystem issues (it's now easily as quick as any of my other P35 boards) and the basic motherboard itself is very quick indeed. Add in the act that at default chipset voltages, the board runs very cool, and I think it's a decent buy at that price.

As far as overclocking goes it's exceptional with 1333MHz dual-cores (I've seen over 4.2GHz with an E6750 , and 500x8 was prime stable for 12 hours). It's not quite so good on Quads (3.6GHz prime stable 12 hours on my best G0 Q6600) but for the money it's very decent indeed.

Before they released the V1.3 BIOS I was extremely critical. but credit where it's due, J&W put in a lot of work, and released a new BIOS, and the board is now every bit as good as the cheaper P35 boards from the established names.
 
Hi,

Yer have a look at the official OC thread for the above mentioned board.

lots of useful info in there,

I have one it's a great board don't be fooled by how cheap it is, the build quality is A1

Paul
 
My personal choice would be the MSI P35 Neo2 FR.

At £75 its one of the best value boards available in my opinion. The layout is great, build quality is superb and the bios options are fantastic. Quite easily got my Q6600 G0 up to 3.8 with 1.55v.

I also have an OcUK value IP35 board in the wife's PC and would agree for the money its brill but The support is quite lacking and bios updates are few and far between, so I'd still take the MSI over it anyday of the week.

Oh and onboard sound = argh :(
 
ManCuBuS said:
The support is quite lacking and bios updates are few and far between
Click to expand...

The board hasn't been available for 4 weeks yet, and they've re-written the BIOS to address every issue anyone on these forums has raised. They have a dedicated support engineer (kenofstephen) who responds to posts positively and quickly. I think that's pretty special, rather than lacking.

As far as I know MSI have nothing like that? I'm not knocking the MSI board, but the v1.3 BIOS really does revolutionise the performance of the OcUK IP35-Pro.
 
thecremeegg said:
The main thing that puts me off is the possible lack of support for it?
How often do new drivers get released? What onboard sound does it use?
Click to expand...

The onboard sound is Intel Azalia/Realtek HD. The cost saving over most other P35 boards is enough to buy a decent PCI soundcard though.
 
ManCuBuS said:
My personal choice would be the MSI P35 Neo2 FR.

At £75 its one of the best value boards available in my opinion. The layout is great, build quality is superb and the bios options are fantastic. Quite easily got my Q6600 G0 up to 3.8 with 1.55v.

I also have an OcUK value IP35 board in the wife's PC and would agree for the money its brill but The support is quite lacking and bios updates are few and far between, so I'd still take the MSI over it anyday of the week.

Oh and onboard sound = argh :(
Click to expand...


MSI P35 Neo2 is a fantastic board at a killer price :)
 
Fine for an e6400 dual core, but if you do fancy going to a kentfield or Yorkfield quad at a later date the MSI board will be the better choice. abit ip35's suffer from even more vdrop than the pro's, in the region of 0.07-0.10v in windows and yet more vdroop under quad load. As you are on an overclocking forum I assume you will dabble with a bit of overclocking.
 
I think there is scope here to say the best sub-£100 board isn't quite launched yet as if the J&W X38 board is launched at under £100, and it launches with a decent BIOS, then it should wipe the floor with the competition.
 
check out the P5K, they put the sata ports behind the primary pci-e x16 slot!! in almost all cases the sata 1 port is blocked. but they supply a 90 degree cable to clear.

with the msi board chances are you won’t use a second card on a p35 board as its not an ideal chipset to run crossfire.

speaking of crossfire.....

WJA96 said:
I think there is scope here to say the best sub-£100 board isn't quite launched yet as if the J&W X38 board is launched at under £100, and it launches with a decent BIOS, then it should wipe the floor with the competition.
Click to expand...

Having full crossfire support for possibly under 100quid, yeah that’s spot on! but how else will it wipe the floor WJA96?

I’ve seen far too many people regretting the purchase of x38 boards, just have a look at the wolfdale thread and see how many peeps are having issues overclocking them and then compare them to others that are clocking the nuts of these new 45nm with humble p35 boards!
 
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