Which motherboard for C2D?

[MystaEB]

I'm upgrading to Core 2 Duo (yay) in the next week or so, I'm already fairly well decided on the CPU and memory front, however I'm unsure which motherboard I should get.

Initially, I planned to get the Gigabyte 965P-DS3, which seems to be the best overall performer in the £80-90 area (And I am also quite fond of Gigabyte), but after reading discussions here and in various other places the memory compatibility issues have discouraged me a little. I'm planning to get the OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 ATI CrossFire 2 GB memory kit. (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-075-OC), but have no idea whether this will work with the DS3 both out of the box! If I buy the DS3 and that memory and it doesn't work without a BIOS update I'm fairly screwed.

My other options are the Asus P5B-E and the Abit AB9-Pro, neither seem to be as good overclockers as the DS3 from what I read, and information on those two boards seems fairly limited as far as good reviews go.

Would the P5B-E or AB9 Pro be a better option if I'm unsure about memory comptibilities? I need the best possible overclocking motherboard for sub-£100 since I'm planning to buy an E4300 and get the most out of that.

My other option is to simply go for the DS3 and buy another memory kit, I would like to get the OCZ ATI kit but other options include the Corsair PC2-6400C4 2GB kit or the Kingston HyperX 2GB PC2-6400 LL-EPP kit. Problem is I don't know if either of those kits will work with the DS3 either.

Any help would be hot, ta.


Edit: Also, how good would the Asus P5N-E SLI be in terms of overclocking?

 

[steve258]

I thought the mem voltage issue has been resolved with latest BIOS revision??

If you buy one now you are likely to get one with the updated BIOS pre-loaded.

Any particular reason for going Crossfire mem?? for that price I'd prefer the Crucial Anniversary or save some money and get an ordinary PC6400 kit.

E4300 will OC well without the need for very decent mobo since you only need around 400FSB to push that CPU to 3.6Ghz, which seems to be OC limit for normal C2Ds anyway. A DS3 will easily achieve that.

 

[MystaEB]

Yeah I hoped that if I bought a DS3 now I would get one of the later more compatible BIOSes pre-loaded, but there is no real way to tell. Guess it's a leap of faith, really.

No particular reason for picking the OCZ ATI memory, just preferred the look of it and it's similarly priced compared to all the other equivelant 2 GB PC2-6400 Low Latency kits. I'd like to pick a good 2 GB DDR2 kit that will last me for at least a year or more. There is always the possibility that I will upgrade to a higher end C2D or even AM2/3 if AMD bounce back, and I want a good kit of memory to compliment my system if it ever comes to that. I'm probably either going to go for the OCZ ATI stuff or the Corsair PC2-6400C4 Kit, which many review sites seem to love.

As of this moment it's a coin toss between the Gigabyte DS3 and Asus P5N-E SLI. The DS3 seems to overclock better, and the 965P seems to be a slightly better performing chipset compared to nV650i, but the P5N-E SLI looks better (Purely cosmetic, I know, but I like my components to look nice ), has 2 IDE channels as opposed to the 1 on the DS3, has a much better layout. SLI is a bonus too, even though I'm not planning to go SLI at this moment in time. One thing that worried me about the Asus board is the odd lack of SB heatsink. I can foresee this causing problems in a heavily overclocked envinronment. Nothing a cheap £5 sink can't fix, I guess.

Think I'm starting to lean a little towards the P5N-E, unless I can find a distinct reason to pick the DS3 over it.

 

[WJA96]

The main reason for going for the DS3 at the moment is price. For £82 it is a very good deal. As far as I am aware all the RAM issues were sorted out some time ago and no-one has complained of a RAM problem on here recently.

One gigantic benefit of the ASUS P5N-E SLi that you haven't mentioned is it's ability to use 'ordinary' RAM rather than 'overclocking' RAM and still get a stonking overclock out of the CPU. The Southbridge doesn't need a heatsink. Mine never warms up at all. It does need a much bigger passive heatsink on *** Northbridge - but only at the most extreme stages of overclocking (stock voltage is 1.2V and my Northbridge heatsink only becomes untouchable if I put the top 1.793V setting through it and then jack up the FSB to somewhere approaching 500!).

Both are great boards - you wouldn't be disappointed with either. One big benefit of dealing with somewhere like OcUK on the Gigabyte is that they are selling so many boards they turn their stocks over regularly and your chances of getting one with an old BIOS are very, very low indeed.

 

[WJA96]

Also, how good would the Asus P5N-E SLI be in terms of overclocking?

Pretty good. Certainly as good as the DS3.

 

[MystaEB]

That's pretty much cleared up any existing queries I had about these two boards, thanks a lot for the reply, I really appreciate it.

I think I'm probably going to go for the P5N-E SLI simply because it's layout is a little more suitable for my current case setup, and although I'm not planning to use SLI, it would be a "nice to have" addition if I ever wanted to use SLI in the future. (And a few reviews seem to have discovered that even though they are 8x per PCIe, running 2 8800 GTS in SLI config only causes problems at very high resolutions.)

I may still have a rampant change of mind and go for the DS3, but at least I know both boards won't disappoint!

Thanks again.

 

[ethan]

The main reason for going for the DS3 at the moment is price. For £82 it is a very good deal. As far as I am aware all the RAM issues were sorted out some time ago and no-one has complained of a RAM problem on here recently.

One gigantic benefit of the ASUS P5N-E SLi that you haven't mentioned is it's ability to use 'ordinary' RAM rather than 'overclocking' RAM and still get a stonking overclock out of the CPU. The Southbridge doesn't need a heatsink. Mine never warms up at all. It does need a much bigger passive heatsink on *** Northbridge - but only at the most extreme stages of overclocking (stock voltage is 1.2V and my Northbridge heatsink only becomes untouchable if I put the top 1.793V setting through it and then jack up the FSB to somewhere approaching 500!).

Both are great boards - you wouldn't be disappointed with either. One big benefit of dealing with somewhere like OcUK on the Gigabyte is that they are selling so many boards they turn their stocks over regularly and your chances of getting one with an old BIOS are very, very low indeed.

When you say "ordinary ram" you don't mean ddr1 or pc400 do you? Sorry I misunderstood: you mean non specific ram etc

I have wondered about the pn5-e myself since it uses a nforce chipset. Taking this into consideration, I am wondering if it would be possible to move from an nforce4 chipset to the 650i chipset without having to reformat. I have done this from nforce2 to 4 without probs.