Looking for a recommendation

kiltman67

kiltman67

kiltman67

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I've been trying to overclock my CPU and found out that my current ASRock motherboard will only let me set the FSB as high as 299MHz.

Rather than changing my CPU, I'd rather get a new motherboard that'll allow me to overclock a little higher and then a year or two down the road I'll buy a new CPU. So I'm looking for a 775 motherboard that's going to be easier to overclock with.

My only real requirement is at least one PCI-E x16 slot.

Price wise, ideally I want to be under £80 but willing to go a little over if it's absolutely necessary.

The Gigabyte GA_P35_DS3R seems a strong possibility, but don't know how good an overclocker it is beyond one positive review.
 
what CPU have you got?
would be a shame to buy a new board & then find out that your CPU series was limited in fsb to only slightly higher than what you can currently achieve.
 
kiltman67 said:
I've been trying to overclock my CPU and found out that my current ASRock motherboard will only let me set the FSB as high as 299MHz.

Rather than changing my CPU, I'd rather get a new motherboard that'll allow me to overclock a little higher and then a year or two down the road I'll buy a new CPU. So I'm looking for a 775 motherboard that's going to be easier to overclock with.

My only real requirement is at least one PCI-E x16 slot.

Price wise, ideally I want to be under £80 but willing to go a little over if it's absolutely necessary.

The Gigabyte GA_P35_DS3R seems a strong possibility, but don't know how good an overclocker it is beyond one positive review.
Click to expand...

As BUFF says you need to tell us the CPU, RAM etc. that you want to use so we can match it all up.

All the P35 series Gigabyte, Abit and ASUS motherboards are superb overclockers, but they have fixed CPU:Memory ratio's so you need fast-ish RAM to get the best from them. If you have slow RAM eg. PC4200 or PC5300 then an NVidia chipset motherboard eg. EVGA 650i Ultra or Gigabyte N650i-DS4 might be better as you can vary the RAM and CPU speed independently.

The P35 boards excel with Quad-cores, while the cheaper NVidia chipset boards tend to struggle a bit over 333FSB (the 680i Chipset boards are much better).

So it all really comes down to what you've got, but for £50-£80 you'll get something very decent.
 
I have an E6300, at the moment just aiming to get it up to 2.2GHz, though as time goes by I may want push it a little further before I have to make a jump to a new one.

As for RAM I have four 512MB PC5300.

Depending on how much I can squeeze out of the CPU with that RAM I could hold on to what I have for now and then buy faster RAM whenever I get the faster CPU.
 
next question - what features do you need/want (RAID, Firewire, ability to run Crossfire etc.)?
 
BUFF said:
next question - what features do you need/want (RAID, Firewire, ability to run Crossfire etc.)?
Click to expand...

All I really need is a PCI-E x16, at least 3 PCI slots, SATA (RAID not necessary), at least one Firewire and at least 3 USB ports. Nothing particularly uncommon I don't think.

My ASRock ConroeXFire suits me perfectly except for the poor OC abilities.
 
You may be interested in this motherboard meets your criteria and wont break the bank

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-086-GI&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=

Supports Intel® Core™ 2 multi-core and upcoming 45nm processors
- Supports both DDR2 and DDR3 memory for great flexibility
- Features PCI Express x16 for outstanding graphics performance
- Integrated SATA 3Gb/s with RAID function
- Features high speed Gigabit Ethernet
- Ultra Durable 2 motherboard design
- Japanese manufactured solid capacitors
- Audio controller from ALC 889A supporting for both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats.
 
There are some decent boards in the OcUK B-grade section at the moment

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BG-085-GI&groupid=595&catid=596&subcat=689

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BG-083-GI&groupid=595&catid=596&subcat=689

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BG-276-AS&groupid=595&catid=596&subcat=689

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BG-024-DF&groupid=595&catid=596&subcat=689

The only thing you have to be careful of is that they are sometimes missing the I/O shield which really upsets some people.

3 PCI slots is actually less common than you might think. Are you aware they now do a 1333MHz version of your existing motherboard? In this review they tested the board with an E6300 and got 345FSB from it (2.4GHz) which may be enough to convince you to buy ASRock again.
 
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