Best motherboard for 2500k / 2600k overclocking?

[Jhatfie]

so if overclocking, crossfire and sli are the only things i need, which specific mobo would be good for me?

I cannot speak for all the viable options available out there, but I personally have the Asus P8Z68-V and love it. If you can get by with on 2 SATA 6GB ports, instead of 4 that you find on the PRO version. Paid $155 for it at ewiz.com using one of their $10 promo codes they have al the time. Easy 24/7 OC to 4.8Ghz with my 2500k, does 5Ghz if I want to apply more voltage, which I do not. Crossfire/SLI ready with 8x/8x lanes. UEFI bios is fantastic, Turbo V auto OC'd to stable 4.4Ghz without me having to do a thing, 16 phase power. Just a solid board for me so far.

 

[bryanW1995]

And you have a silver arrow, which is an excellent aftermarket cooler.

 

[grkM3]

Russian I dont care what you have done in the past,throw 4 sticks of ram in your p67 pro and try to boot at anything over 1866 with 1t on.

I bet you cant because I have that very same board,my 360 dollar ud7 can boot and run stable at 2200 with 1t and 4 sticks of ram with stock ram voltages.

try running 16 gb of ram on that board and see if it will even post at any speeds.

Its not just the memory controller its the board suplying the clean power to the chip.

 

[RussianSensation]

Russian I dont care what you have done in the past,throw 4 sticks of ram in your p67 pro and try to boot at anything over 1866 with 1t on.

See that's what you are not understanding. DDR3-1866 1T is meaningless. So I could care less that some $360 board would boot with those settings with 4 sticks for a 1-3% performance increase.

I bet you cant because I have that very same board,my 360 dollar ud7 can boot and run stable at 2200 with 1t and 4 sticks of ram with stock ram voltages.

That's great. My board cost me $120 and 8GB of G.Skill DDR3-1600 $55.

Your board cost you $360 and 8GB G.Skill DDR3-2200 ram is $300.

I am glad you are enjoying your 2-3% performance increase of DDR3-2200 + $360 board - the setup costs what? $660 vs. $175 that delivers 97-98% of the performance.

I am glad the "investment" was worth it to you. Not everyone makes $1000 a day to justify spending $240 extra for a 2-3% performance increase and practically 0.5 fps in games:

Why would you spend $360 on a board and get 2x GTX560s when you could have gotten a $160 board and 2x GTX570s?

And once you add in the price of expensive DDR3-2133/2200 8GB of Ram, you probably could have gotten 2 x GTX580s or a larger SSD.

 

[Rvenger]

Russian I dont care what you have done in the past,throw 4 sticks of ram in your p67 pro and try to boot at anything over 1866 with 1t on.

I bet you cant because I have that very same board,my 360 dollar ud7 can boot and run stable at 2200 with 1t and 4 sticks of ram with stock ram voltages.

try running 16 gb of ram on that board and see if it will even post at any speeds.

Its not just the memory controller its the board suplying the clean power to the chip.

My Biostar Tz68a+ boots with 4 sticks of 2133mhz ram. On 4 + 1 phase power. But seriously, why do yo need memory that fast?? I returned my 2133 sticks and bought 1600mhz sticks.. I purchased a better CPU cooler for the money so I can overclock a little further.

 

[RussianSensation]

But seriously, why do yo need memory that fast?? I

Maybe he is reaching for the top 10 on Futuremark / WPrime32 boards?

I purchased a better CPU cooler for the money so I can overclock a little further.

:thumbsup:

My first ever build included a loaded Asus $280 board. After 10 years of building PCs, I eventually learned that I can save hundreds of dollars on the motherboard and ram and invest it where it actually counts: cooling, GPUs, SSD, PSU, Monitor.

 

[miji]

But seriously, why do yo need memory that fast??

 

[StrangerGuy]

See that's what you are not understanding. DDR3-1866 1T is meaningless. So I could care less that some $360 board would boot with those settings with 4 sticks for a 1-3% performance increase.

Hey, don't go around bursting bubbles!

Though you gotta love the ever-increasing $300+ mobo and DDR2133+ users flaunting their wares in forums, "omg look I'm hardcorez!" when they in fact look really, really stupid.

 

[guskline]

Back on subject, I've been running a 2500k@4400 on an ASRock Z68 Extreme 4 and am very satisfied. Feature rich. They now have a Gen 3 mb out.

 

[blackened23]

See that's what you are not understanding. DDR3-1866 1T is meaningless. So I could care less that some $360 board would boot with those settings with 4 sticks for a 1-3% performance increase.

Agreed, overclocking ram past 1600 is a COMPLETE waste of time. I've seen numerous benches on this and the take home message is, you can overclock your memory to 2133 for about zero to .4 fps increase in most of your games....

Anyway, i've gotten 2133 on the P8p67 - granted, that was with 999-28 IIRC. I didn't bother running linx/prime 95 but It seemed stable - but I didn't keep it at that because there's no tangible performance benefit. Not for what I do anyway. I'm also curious, lets say the motherboard did make a difference in how well you could push your RAM - is that really possible (i'm honestly curious) - the MC on the sandy bridge is integrated on the CPU.

 

[RussianSensation]

Anyway, i've gotten 2133 on the P8p67 - granted, that was with 999-28 IIRC. I didn't bother running linx/prime 95 but It seemed stable - but I didn't keep it at that because there's no tangible performance benefit. Not for what I do anyway. I'm also curious, lets say the motherboard did make a difference in how well you could push your RAM - is that really possible (i'm honestly curious) - the MC on the sandy bridge is integrated on the CPU.

I think eventually we'll need faster memory, but the CPU will need to become much more powerful. I can also see the requirement for more memory bandwidth with more cores (i.e., 8-16).

Let's say a SB CPU needs 20 MB/s memory bandwidth. What if you give it 100 MB/sec? Well chances are it's already bottlenecked by some other aspect of its architecture. So as long as you provide it with enough memory bandwidth, the additional amount is unlikely to provide a performance increase unless you are running some very specific workstation application that heavily relies on memory bandwidth.

So I don't see how just throwing more memory bandwidth on any architecture will increase its performance unless that CPU architecture was memory bandwidth starved to begin with (Llano GPU comes to mind).