Motherboard and Overclocking help

KaneStatton · 20 Jun 2009 at 02:27

Hi all,
I'm relatively new to re-arranging and replacing things in my PC but currently I have and am able to change PSU's, Harddives and GFX cards fairly easily and confidently.

Its come to the time that I have to change my motherboard as it is some crappy one that came with the PC and does't allow/enable me to overclock the Q6600 and I need to really with the coming of ArmA 2 and future games.

Are there any good quides on replacing motherboards (what motherboard to go for?), what is what and how to overclock the Cpu ? I only want a mild overclock to say 2.8ghz or there abouts is this possible without going under water or voltage mods ?

Thanks for any help
Kane

Mattus · 20 Jun 2009 at 03:02

As for which board to go for: what's your budget? Any half-decent board will get the Q6600 to 3-3.2 with a half-decent air cooler.

As for doing the swap: I'm not sure about guides, but a lot of the same points apply as to any hardware change. Take your time, don't force anything, make sure everything's plugged in.

I'd say some important motherboard-specific points are:

CPU coolers are much easier to install outside of the case
make sure the board is resting on stand-offs and not on the case itself
don't forget auxilary power connectors
install thermal paste according to the manufacturer's instructions

KaneStatton · 20 Jun 2009 at 03:06

No specific budget it just needs to overclock fairly well (3.2 would be excellent)
for as cheap as possible really, under £100 is a must though.

With the q6600 is 3mb of ram good enough ? or should I go up to 4 ?

Mattus · 20 Jun 2009 at 03:12

For £100: Asus P5Q Pro
For £70: Gigabyte EP43-DS3

Both of those are pretty good overclocking boards. The Asus is slightly better but either should reach 3.2.

As for the RAM, there's no reason not to get 4GB. You'll want two equal sticks in dual channel for the best overclocking and performance, so it doesn't really make sense to have 3GB. Plus DDR2 is really, really cheap.

KaneStatton · 20 Jun 2009 at 14:28

Is a Abit IX38 QuadGT Intel X38 any good?
It has crossfire support so I could get another 4850 for cheap from B grade.

Frozen_Texas · 24 Jun 2009 at 10:29

forget about Abit mate, they stopped mobo biz already so no further support is expected from them. gigabyte is OK in terms of price/performance