Thoughts on a decent-overclocking X58 motherboard?

miniyazz

miniyazz

miniyazz

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Or are they are pretty well much of a muchness?

Having just spontaneously bought myself a 920, I've got two options: get out my hammer and chisel and make it fit in my P5Q Pro, or buy myself a shiny new motherboard/RAM to go with it. So since I left my hammer and chisel in my other trousers, here I am looking at motherboards.

Just in case anyone wants to help out, I'm looking for a mobo (overclocking aside) with three (or more) PCI-e x16 slots (doesn't matter if they don't run at full speed), one x1 slot and one PCI slot.. and I would kindof need to have access to all of them with dual-slot cards in each of the x16 slots, although this may not be possible!

But what I'm really after you guys' opinions for, hence posting in Overclocking not Motherboards, is which boards are good and which are to be avoided.

If anyone's interested, I'll be using 6/12GB RAM and a Corsair H50.

Any comments welcome.
 
go for the gigabyte ud5 mobo, three PCI-e and a PCI*8 (short boards only or they wont fit) and a couple of standard PCI slots as well. Has tripple channel ddr3 6 slots which can go up to 24gb (4gb per stick) and has a dual bios in case of any errors. Includes onboard heat level indicators by LED's, supports raid etc, dual rj45 and dolby home digital built in.
 
I'm using the UD5, will be trying for 4.4 stable in the near future so feel it clocks pretty well. The UD3R is an option though it has four slots instead of three, and often struggles to hit 4ghz. I've just rma'd mine, and it took four days to get back to me. My last Asus rma took two months and ended when the retailer sent me a Gigabyte board.

There's not that much in it as far as motherboards go with this generation. All of the "decent" ones with run 200 bsck happily (the new fsb, ish), most of them are happy up to 220 or so, and the best ones are good for 235 or so. Anything over 200 is pretty irrelevant when using air cooling. If the budget will reach, the UD5 is highly recommended. If the pci slot arrangement doesn't work for you, I'd look for whichever one of the Asus P6T range has the right slots.

I believe the biostar is considered very good, but never having owned a biostar I feel poorly placed to recommend it.

12gb of ram + overclocking is difficult, just some advance warning of that. I wouldn't buy 1600mhz ram because the odds of you getting any ram to run at 1600mhz when all the slots are occupied are pretty slim, I've got 1200mhz cas6 at present as the best my nominally 1600c8 will do.
 
Yet another for the UD5.
4-4.2ghz is stupidly easy to get to on this board.

2 x PCI Express x16 slots
1 x PCI Express x8 slot
1 x PCI Express x4 slot
1 x PCI Express x1 slot
2 x PCI slots
 
Thanks for the replies! The OP was actually a couple of weeks ago now though, and while the UD5 was definitely on my shortlist, I eventually went for the UD7 - with even more O/Cing features, a stupidly oversized chipset heatsink, and four x16 slots (4 x8 slots electrically when all in use), and am currently sitting at 4.1GHz without problem :)

The only real drawback with the UD7 is the somewhat inconvenient (for my configuration) layout of PCI-e slots, meaning I can ironically only fit in one (dual slot) graphics card, so I'm slowly changing from dual to single-slot cards. Other than that (and I knew about that before buying), I'm very happy with it!
 
For pcie slot spacing, the asus p6td/dlx v2 are slightly better than the gigabytes. Both are great boards and will overclock to 4ghz easily enough. Gigabyte though, have a better reputation for after sales support (uk rma cenre). Asus are working on improving the support side of things, but i havent heard much about it yet.
 
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