Which Mobo for OCing w/ E6600?!?

[Rike]

Which one?

Intel 975 Bad Ax 2

ASUS P5B Deluxe

EVGA 680i

Things to consider:

1) Max Poss OC (Apogee water block)
2) Overall stability
3) Ease of use
4) Resiliency to failed OC

Comments welcome (needed!).

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

What cooler are you going to be using, and do you already have the cooler? Asus is fine with all coolers (that I know of), but eVGA has some issues.

 

[Rike]

Swiftech watercooling. Double rad, Apogee block.

 

[ShawnD1]

I own an Asus P5B with a 6600 and it absolutely will not overclock. Even that automatic overclocking tool that comes with it causes the computer to go into a never-ending cycling of rebooting. The problem goes away by simple pulling the battery out of the motherboard.

Overall the computer works great, but don't buy the Asus P5B if you intend to overclock it.

 

[Rike]

Were your experiences with the vanilla P5B, the P5B-E, or the P5B Deluxe?

 

[ShawnD1]

I probably have the vanilla one. I assume they would act in a similar manner because they have similar parts. If they had different chipsets and different slots they would have different names.

 

[ProSlayer]

They have diff chipsets:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi...ubmit=ENE&Description=Asus+P5B&Ntk=all

The first one, the vanilla, is different from the rest.

 

[Roguestar]

Gigabyte S3. For the price it's amazing.

 

[Rike]

Thanks for the input, but I'm not too worried about the price as long as I'm not above about $260. I just don't want a mobo that holds back the CPU.

 

[cmdrdredd]

The 680i will outperform all the rest. Thanks to it's superior memory controller and allowing 1T command rate. You no longer need high end memory to overclock your CPU.

For example. If you want to boot your system at 450Mhz FSB on a P5B you need memory that can do DDR2-900. That means you have to buy better quality memory (i.e. expensive). If you get the 680i you can run your memory at DDR2-800 even when your FSB is above 400Mhz. And you can run DDR2-800 4-4-4-12-1T with some higher quality memory (not really expensive overclocker memory even). To achieve the same performance on the P5B you need to run DDR2-1200+ because the P5B cannot run 1T.

If I was buying today there's nothing that would make me buy a P965 board vs a 680i board.

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
I own an Asus P5B with a 6600 and it absolutely will not overclock. Even that automatic overclocking tool that comes with it causes the computer to go into a never-ending cycling of rebooting. The problem goes away by simple pulling the battery out of the motherboard.

Overall the computer works great, but don't buy the Asus P5B if you intend to overclock it.

K, so because you either have a defective mobo, or worse yet, you are using the auto OCing options (which one should never ever use), the P5B is crap?

:roll:

Sorry, but that's just not true.
While the P5B vanilla isn't fantastic & seems to have a few more issues, the P5B series is basically the best line right now overall for high FSBs for semi decent pricing.

That all being said, i too would lean toward 680i right now myself if money was absolutely no object.

Since i find 680i to be way overpriced though, i'd suggest the P5B-E to anyone as a great value OCing option that generally does just as well as the P5B-D.

 

[imported_browsing]

I've got a P5W DH Deluxe, a bit pricy but not as expensive as it was, and it OCs very well.