Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4L

Mista.Gee · 14 Jan 2008 at 16:41

I'm interested in getting the Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4L along with the Intel Core 2 Duo E2180 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.00GHz (800FSB) and Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 TwinX (2x1GB) for overclocking purposes.

Been reading some excellent reviews about the Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4L and though before I take the plunge i'd ask the audience and see what they thought before I do so.

Rroff · 14 Jan 2008 at 16:59

I'd get some OCZ 6400 Reaper personally for that board... you can run it at 4-3-3-8 and get silly fast memory bandwidth at stock 800MHz on 2.1v (well within voltage spec)...

Great board but a good investment is a high capacity fan directly on the Northbridge heatsink or replacing the NB heatsink entirely with a high end cooler with fan... at stock its fully stable but if you overclock beyond 375MHz on the FSB the stock NB cooler will not keep it cool enough.

I'm still playing with the board at the moment but heres where I've got to so far:

http://aten-hosted.com/images/650i.jpg

One thing I would warn about... make a decision if you want dual x8 SLI or single x16 PCI-e BEFORE you mount the motherboard in the case... instead of a switch card SLI selection is done with a bunch of jumpers and they aren't even easy to swap over with the motherboard out of a case let alone mounted...

Mista.Gee · 14 Jan 2008 at 17:09

Does it support EPP/SLi memory?

Rroff · 14 Jan 2008 at 17:10

No - but with the OCZ Reaper you can set the EPP timings manually (and infact go below them) and get very fast memory performance...

If you can get some memory that does 4-3-3-8 (the OCZ Reaper should - mine does no sweat) the memory controller takes off - bandwidth and latency is better than most modules at 1066 4-4-4-12.

Mista.Gee · 14 Jan 2008 at 17:16

Okie Dokie going to do alittle more research into it this week before I commit to the purchase.

Rroff · 14 Jan 2008 at 17:25

BTW Do you have any links to good reviews? I'd be interested to see some other peoples' experinces with this board - I just started playing with it on the side as I had some spare cash.

Rroff · 14 Jan 2008 at 18:18

Wooo just got it tested memtest stable at 4-3-3-4 doesn't actually do anything for the bandwidth - but pulls the latency down by ~5.5ns

Rroff · 14 Jan 2008 at 20:20

mmm 850MHz @ 4-3-3-8 2.1v with 425MHz FSB stable... and moving on - testing 438 now, unfortunatly I think one of the cores on my E6600 isn't going to be stable at 3.6gig with less than 1.6v but gonna get as close as I can....

WJA96 · 14 Jan 2008 at 21:33

Mista.Gee said:
Does it support EPP/SLi memory?

I don't know if you are aware of this, but the SLi/EPP RAM function only works in the automatic overclocking modes. If you use manual overclocking, it is disabled.

Rroff · 15 Jan 2008 at 00:00

and I finally got the CPU stable (atleast for an hour and 20 mins orthos and general benchmarking) at 3.5gig

http://aten-hosted.com/images/650i2.jpg

Needed +0.2 on the chipset/buses to get there but I think the board would be good for atleast 450 FSB with those settings as it only just needed the extra voltage to get above 430... unfortunatly one of the cores on the E6600 is a bit naff and I can't get 3.6gig stable on any sensible voltage... I still love that RAM bandwidth... no idea how much more the RAM has going for it - but quite a bit I should imagine if your prepared to go above 2.1v.