mATX Advice

[xxvv]

Hi All,

Need a new motherboard for a Intel Dual Core 5200, i don't need any fancy features (raid, firewire, xfire etc), just a good solid motherboard to overclock the 5200, in which case I've been looking at the mATX boards purely for price, no unneeded features and potential to use a smaller case.

Would like a mild overclock (from 2.5ghz to 3.0-3.33ghz)
Would like to spend around the £50 mark
Would like to fit a decent sized GPU (i.e. hd4850)?

Been looking at -

- ASUS P5KPL-CM
- Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L

Any advice on the above or other suggestions for around the same price?

Cheers.

 

[Big.Wayne]

I can vouch for the ASUS P5KPL-CM, it's a good little board for a good little price!

I bought it as a stop gap and was curious to see what a £40 board could do, used with an E5200 at first which overclocked to 3.0GHz just by setting the *auto* overclock in BIOS to +20% lol . . . . I also plopped an E8400 in and used the same *auto* overclock feature to clock the chip to 3.6GHz.

The G31 Express has a 4GB memory limit and the P5KPL-CM has two memory slots so a 4GB kit seems a good choice! I used a 4GB(2x2GB) kit of OCZ DDR2-1066.

 

[xxvv]

The asus auto option is pretty good, but you cannot adjust the vcore manually, so you experience high voltages with auto, whereas the gigabyte board has the option to change manually.