Chipset's

dudeone · 4 Nov 2006 at 09:10

Looking for some advice,

I am going to build a new rig very shortly and ive started to read up on all components I want to use, the CPU I am looking to use is a Pentium E6600 but I am unsure about a mobo at the moment to match it to.

My question is in regards to the chipsets on the mobo's as ive read a few articles and spoke to some people, the problem I have is that Intel seem to favor the 975X chipset where as advice tells me to ignore Intel and look at the 965 chipset so I am a little stuck.

I would appreciate if anyone who's running a E6600 could let me know which mobo they use and would recommend.

I am looking to use the new rig for gaming, some work purposes and surfing.

Help please……………

Cheers Dave

LoadsaMoney · 4 Nov 2006 at 19:25

Welcome to the forums.

I have an E6600 here on the Gigabyte DS4 motherboard, cracking board imo, no problems at all with it, they are higly recommended along with the Gigabyte DS3's.

Also the Asus P5W is a good board as well by all accounts.

WJA96 · 5 Nov 2006 at 08:45

Your description of your requirements is not much to go on as it's extremely vague with no budget, but I like...

1. For games I like SLi so I have an E6600 mated to an ASUS P5NSLi board, running at 3.1GHz (25% overclock - the most I can get

)

2. For maximal overclocking I have an E6300 mated to a Gigabyte DS4 however it cannot run a divider on the RAM so you need to be able to run the RAM 1:1 to overclock PC6400 RAM will take you to FSB of 400 and a little more, PC8000 will take you to FSB of 500 and PC8500 will take you all the way to 1066MHz at which point you have a 100% overclock! I only have cheap RAM, so I'm at 2.8GHz (over 50% overclock!)

3. For people who want good performance without shelling out loads of money for RAM and overclocking I recommend the ASRock ConroeXFire eSATA II with an E6600, cheap (PC4200) RAM and a moderate overclock to 2.7GHz. If you want better performance on this board in games it's easy to run Crossfire or SLi with hacked drivers.

4. If you want mATX then use spec. 3 but swap in the ASRock 945G DVI for even less money.

The Intel 975 chipset was the first chipset to support Core2Duo. It has the ICH7/ICH7R bridge and it runs very well. The 945 chipset (used by ASRock) was not supposed to be able to run Core2Duo, but they managed it somehow and it's very good for the money. The 965 chipset (with ICH8/ICH8R) is a later chipset and was designed for Core2Duo from the outset. Most things about it are better optimised for Core2Duo.

The existing NVidia and ATI chipsets have been modded, like the 945 chipset, to run with Core2Duo and they are good, stable chipsets as well.

There are no real dogs out there, unless you want to overclock, in which case, stick with the ASUS P5B/W models and the Gigabyte DS3 or DS4.

Matrix · 5 Nov 2006 at 09:26

WJA96 said:
Your description of your requirements is not much to go on as it's extremely vague with no budget, but I like...

1. For games I like SLi so I have an E6600 mated to an ASUS P5NSLi board, running at 3.1GHz (25% overclock - the most I can get )

2. For maximal overclocking I have an E6300 mated to a Gigabyte DS4 however it cannot run a divider on the RAM so you need to be able to run the RAM 1:1 to overclock PC6400 RAM will take you to FSB of 400 and a little more, PC8000 will take you to FSB of 500 and PC8500 will take you all the way to 1066MHz at which point you have a 100% overclock! I only have cheap RAM, so I'm at 2.8GHz (over 50% overclock!)

3. For people who want good performance without shelling out loads of money for RAM and overclocking I recommend the ASRock ConroeXFire eSATA II with an E6600, cheap (PC4200) RAM and a moderate overclock to 2.7GHz. If you want better performance on this board in games it's easy to run Crossfire or SLi with hacked drivers.

4. If you want mATX then use spec. 3 but swap in the ASRock 945G DVI for even less money.

The Intel 975 chipset was the first chipset to support Core2Duo. It has the ICH7/ICH7R bridge and it runs very well. The 945 chipset (used by ASRock) was not supposed to be able to run Core2Duo, but they managed it somehow and it's very good for the money. The 965 chipset (with ICH8/ICH8R) is a later chipset and was designed for Core2Duo from the outset. Most things about it are better optimised for Core2Duo.

The existing NVidia and ATI chipsets have been modded, like the 945 chipset, to run with Core2Duo and they are good, stable chipsets as well.

There are no real dogs out there, unless you want to overclock, in which case, stick with the ASUS P5B/W models and the Gigabyte DS3 or DS4.

Very helpful post mate as i'm in the same boat myself.
I'm looking at the P5W DH DELUX myself as i'm looking at buying a crossfire card. I'm taking it that i could still use 1 crossfire card on a ds4 board though?

WJA96 · 5 Nov 2006 at 13:31

There were posts some time back that said the DS4, DS4G and DQ6 supported Crossfire. Have a google. I've only got NVidia cards so I couldn't test it I'm afraid.

LoadsaMoney · 5 Nov 2006 at 21:57

Yes you can use Crossfire on the DS4/DQ6 now, but the 2nd PCI-E slot only runs at 4x, so it aint worth it.

WJA96 · 5 Nov 2006 at 23:20

That's not correct - it runs as 2 x 10x PCIe rather than 2 x 16x on a true Crossfire board. But that's true for the Badaxe, and all the ASUS P965 and P975 boards. You can only have so many PCIe channels available, and that's how they have divided them up.

BUFF · 6 Nov 2006 at 00:17

WJA96 said:
That's not correct - it runs as 2 x 10x PCIe rather than 2 x 16x on a true Crossfire board. But that's true for the Badaxe, and all the ASUS P965 and P975 boards. You can only have so many PCIe channels available, and that's how they have divided them up.

975 runs 2x x8 in Crossfire, 965 runs x16/x4
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2837

WJA96 · 6 Nov 2006 at 05:28

BUFF said:
975 runs 2x x8 in Crossfire, 965 runs x16/x4
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2837

OK, Thanks for that. I have seen another review that showed the Gigabyte running at 2 x 10x, but this one clearly says that is not possible and has a sensible technical reason why, so I'll accept that they run at 16x and 4x on the 965 and 2 x 8x on the 975.

The last line of that review is "We still have a significant amount of testing to complete but at this time it appears ATI CrossFire works as advertised on the P965 platform and maybe just that much better on the ASUS P5B Deluxe."

They clearly did see a small drop in performance, 6-9% against the 975 device, but they still significantly outperformed the 7950GX2s in 16X mode, so however you divide up the extra 4 channels, it's worth doing crossfire on a 965 board in my opinion.