rock solid & fast - a real minter

Soldato
Joined
19 Oct 2002
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3,480
hi peeps...

tomorrow morning i will be RMAing my new P5K deluxe as its died on me already :( - can't believe my bad luck...

anyway, the first board i had was a gigabyte DS3P, which did my head in in terms of cycle rebooting and the like, then this one which worked fine for 5 days then died... 3rd time lucky?

i want a board that is good at overclocking, is rock solid, and doesnt have and weird quirks like the gigabyte had with cycle rebooting...

does such a board exist? money is not a problem if that is what is required to achieve these requirements but if possible would like a ~£100 board...

just summat thats tried and tested and the ducks nuts ;)

i've tried gigabyte, didn't like there rebooting "feature" one little bit, tries Asus which turned out to be scrap metal/silicone, maybe i should give abit a shot?
 
liking the look of the abit quad GT or maybe the DFI dark... what dyu think?

like i said before, i need:

1) reliable
2) fast
3) good feature set

off to ocuk 2morrow so opinions please :)
 
My EVGA 680i was solid and fast until something in the CPU power section fried. Column of smoke = BAD! :eek:

Apart from the failure i couldn't fault it! :p

Just replaced it with a new P35 DS3P. Seems far more stable and happy than my old DS3.

Runs cool and fast and, from what datamonkey says in another thread in this section, it clocks Quads well too! 3.5ghz with very little tinkering is nothing to sniff at for £100!!! :)

gt
 
QuiKsiLVeR said:
liking the look of the abit quad GT or maybe the DFI dark... what dyu think?

like i said before, i need:

1) reliable
2) fast
3) good feature set

off to ocuk 2morrow so opinions please :)
DFI was my first choice but WJA mentioned that the capacitors shreak on some which is not my cup of tea. Looks like a great board though. You sound like you live nearby so i'd get it and then return it if you have any probs!

I love DFI. My favourite board had to be my old trusty 939 SLi-DR... absolutely awesome. Never missed a beat despite being thrashed every day i had it! :D

gt
 
QuadGT I would say, WJA recomends it - and he has had more C2D motherboards than most.

Dark is faster, but not much in it really - you wouldn't see if in real term performance, only synthetic benchmarks and they seem to have a squeeling cap problem.
 
when the p35 died did it stink of burning as mine went under the mosfets not even 24 hours from new
 
gt_junkie said:
DFI was my first choice but WJA mentioned that the capacitors shreak{sic} on some which is not my cup of tea.

is that the DFI Dark? I'm interested in giving that board a play sometime as I've not had much luck with LGA775 boards (and heard lots of horror stories with the boards I've not tried)... as its quite late to the table (specially for a 965 board) I was hoping maybe DFI had ironed out some of the gremlins... the DFI 975X was pretty bad - a great overclocking board and screaming performance/stability... but prone to cold boot issues and several BIOS problems that could render the board completely dead just from selecting one wrong setting...
 
I know how you feel with bad boards. On my third P5N-E now, seems to be working nicely and overclocked to 450 easily. Going to try pushing it further soon but not sure how much more my memory will take.

Either DFI Dark or Abit QuadGT will probably be best for stability. WJA loves his quadGT so I'd probably go for that so long as there's no differences with the DFI that would make you prefer it.

Both Asus and Gigabyte don't seem to worry too much about product testing. In the future I will definitely be trying to avoid both which won't always be easy as they seem to always be the first two to the table with new chipsets. They sacrifice quality for speed though. DFI or Abit both seem to take their time and make sure their boards are decent before sending them out.
 
Darg said:
I know how you feel with bad boards. On my third P5N-E now, seems to be working nicely and overclocked to 450 easily. Going to try pushing it further soon but not sure how much more my memory will take.

Either DFI Dark or Abit QuadGT will probably be best for stability. WJA loves his quadGT so I'd probably go for that so long as there's no differences with the DFI that would make you prefer it.

Both Asus and Gigabyte don't seem to worry too much about product testing. In the future I will definitely be trying to avoid both which won't always be easy as they seem to always be the first two to the table with new chipsets. They sacrifice quality for speed though. DFI or Abit both seem to take their time and make sure their boards are decent before sending them out.
yeah i get that impression, i do like the look of the DFI, but do they all have this squeeling capacitor problem?

i'm thinking bar that the DFI would be the superiour board but not many people have tried both...
 
I have a DFI Dark board at the moment only bought it to have a play about.Anyway after a week of playing about with it looks like i'll sell my EVGA 680i board and keep this.Don't have any cap noise and it seems to overclock my C2D 6600 a lot better then my 680i.
 
avoid the rd600 (dfi icfx 3200), without doing your research. Some people have got good boards, but most have so many issues with these cold boot issues, memory the lot. Does appear to be the best overclocker if you can get a good one though.
 
BristolBulldog said:
avoid the rd600 (dfi icfx 3200), without doing your research. Some people have got good boards, but most have so many issues with these cold boot issues, memory the lot. Does appear to be the best overclocker if you can get a good one though.


Are you talking about the DFI 965-S board?
 
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If you want total, utter, rock solid stability then buy an Intel manufactured Intel board, but it won't overclock especially well. Again ASRock are all 100% utterly stable, but a bit unexciting.

I have yet to try a P35 board (I'm sick of dismantling my water-cooling :rolleyes: ) but the Abit AB9-QuadGT with the BIOS v13 is about as good as it gets at the moment.

Don't fuss over it, don't perturb yourself over the heatsink temperatures or anything else, just stick a CPU, some RAM and a graphics card in the box with it, shake vigorously with a decent hard drive and just turn the whole thing up to 11. :D

It really is the best of the S775 boards I've tested so far.
 
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