MB for E6600 quasi-high-end-gaming-rig

I am sick of reading page after page of reviews. The more I read, the more it looks like the differences between all the boards is minimal. So who are the votes for? 965P, 975, 680i?

Wants:
- I want to be able to oc as much as possible on air to start, the switch to water when I get bored.
- Wifi is unimportant to me as I will never use it with this machine.
- I do not need CF or SLI; I dont forsee using more than one vid card.
- RAID is important, I will be using this.

- Budget = willing to spend what it takes

Hardware I will be using:
- 2 x 74GB WD raptor in raid 0
- 1 x 320GB Segate storage drive
- 2 x Optical drive
- 2 x 1GB sticks DDR2 800Mhz (Gskill or Teamgroup)
- 1900XTX
- 600 Silverstone strider PSU
- TT SViking case (may purchase new case shortly)

I've read 965 allow for more FSB increase, but that 975 will be faster at the same clock speed. Do these effectively cancel eachother out? Most of the reviews of boards from all 3 chipsets I've read end up getting similar results. At this point, I am prob going to get a P5B-Deluxe unless someone talks me out of it.

I'm in the same boat, I've been reading page after page after page and came to the same conclusion as you. From what I can tell they all will do great as gaming board and all will overclock good. The 680i and the 965P seem to be the better overclockers even though I haven't seen many results on the 680i and I've seen endless pages on the 965P. The 975 seems to not overclock as well as the 965P (by a small margin) and still has BIOS bugs in terms of compatibility on some boards while the 965P doesn't have as many being tested more. Most of the compatibilty problems I've seen have been with ram and mainly voltage settings which in most cases has been fixed with BIOS updates. The problem lies in if you have other ram to put in so you can do the BIOS update which alot of people don't.

As far as SLI/CF I don't think it really makes a difference if it has it or not. It seems most of the top end boards from the major manufacturers will have duel slots so I came to the conclusion to just buy an SLI board even though like you I probably won't use it. Most of the boards with RAID will have SLI also.

I tend to lean towards Abit when buying motherboards due to good support for mods and past reliability so I've pretty much decided on the AW8D or AW9D, the MAX version is a little more pricey than I want to spend and I really don't see a difference that matters to me.

Oh well that's 3 of us .
I'm probably buying around febuary, (got 2 spend some money on wife 4 xmas ).
I will probably go with a sli/crossfire capable board for same reasons as wannaoc.
Some 965 boards are capable of crossfire P965 Gets CrossFire: 975X vs P965 CrossFire Performance w/ASUS P5B Deluxe & Catalyst 6.10
& the memory controller is better than the 975

The Bearlake Chipset A look at Intel's upcoming moves is coming up which is in effect an upgrade of the 975X & which may be promising.

I've read up on the 680i , nvidia have done a good job but beyond the hype am not convinced that performance is any better than say the 965,
from Nvidia nForce 680i SLI Chipset Review

As we have found out almost immediately, the system boots and works absolutely stable at 449MHz FSB frequency. However, if we added at least 1MHz in the BIOS Setup, the board couldn’t pass the POST stage.

Click to expand...

And

The second conclusion also turned out not very optimistic. Our mainboard failed to let the memory work at the same frequency as on Intel P965 Express mainboard we used before. Nvidia nForce 680i SLI reference solution allowed the memory to work at 1098MHz maximum, no higher than that. Although the system would still start at even higher DDR2 SDRAM memory frequency, the system would still fail the stability tests.

Click to expand...

May be helped by better bios but atm don't feel like supporting Nvidia Ships World’s Most Expensive Desktop Core-Logic
unless i see a significant performance hike.

Will probably go asus/abit but if i went 680i think the evga board looks better than the asus striker.

E6600- it depends on how hard you plan on pushing it, If you want a hard overclock on it or possibly bench it with DI *more extream* then the Asus P5B-Deluxe non-wifi sounds like its up your alley. It has memory subtimings in the bios that if tweaked (add Vdimm lower the subtimings) will get it up close to par with 975X for sinthetic benchmarks and from what Ive seen it seems to beat 975X in FPS gaming benchmarks.

If you want to save $$, go with the P965. If you want the possibility of pushing over 4 Ghz, get the 680i. From what I've heard: The ABIT AB9 Pro is max stable around 435 FSB. The ASUS P5B-Deluxe stable around 450 FSb.

The ASUS 680i max stable at 500 and eVGA 680 stable around 506 FSB.

I've did a eVGA 680i setup with the E6600 for a friend yesterday. I could not use it's full potential because I only went up to 400 FSB before CPU heat kills the stability. I was only got it stable around 3.4 to 3.6 with the artic freezer. Maybe with better cooling I could push it a little higher but that's good enough.

I'm doing a new different setup tonight with the ABIT P965 and E6600. Result will probably be around the same because I'm using the same cooler.

If you get the E6400 (8X multi), definately get the 680i but if you are getting the E6600 (9x multi), the P965 should be good enough (unless you have very good cooling and want to push it above 4 Hz.

I put together the Ab9 pro and also got the e6600 stable at 3.6. I was able to get it stable with a lower Vcore setting on the Abit AB9 pro. 1.45V vs 1.6V on the eVGA. The eVGA is also indicating a much higher temp 41C vs 30C on the Abit. I'm not sure what's causing the difference becasue they are both using the E6600 CPU and the Artic Freezer CPU cooler. Same type of case.

Both will boot into Windows at 4.0 Ghz but not stable. Perhaps I should have gotten a better cooler but 3.6 is plenty fast for the people I'm build the computer for. They don't know too much about computers so stability is key.

I Like the uGuru on the Abit but the setting only goes up to 400FSB. To get higher FSB, I have to go into the bios and uninstall the uGuru. The Abit also have the nice Flash Menu for updating the bios and the Abit EQ for monitoring CPU temp and fan speed. This may be why the CPU temp is cooler with the same case (only the color is defferent).

Out of these two mobo, I like the Abit a little more because of the easier bios and little extra options; the Flash Menu, etc. A few people on the Abit forum got the FSB pass 500 but that looks impossible with the E6600 and cooling that I have.

good going.

uGuru on the Abit but the setting only goes up to 400FSB

Click to expand...

Doh They'll have 2 recalibrate it

Must admit i'm tending to come round to favouring 2 abit boards :-
1) Abit AW9D Max after reading around & looking over Deanzo's shoulder in above thread,
or
2) Abit IN9 32X-MAX it looks great & £ of around £176 makes it good value compaered to boards like the Asus Striker which cost £250.

Only fly in the ointment atm are compatabilirty issues with my LIan Li V2000+ case. It's an inverted atx case LIan Li V2000B+

There are 2 issues here:-
1) Chipset cooling pipes. Have seen several threads like thisAW9D Heatpipes on Inverted Cases but there's nothing giving a definate anser 1 way or the other. It seems that if the pipes have a wick then orientation doesn't matter.
2) The cpu socket is much nearer the side of the noard than my current amd, this means that for a heatsink like the noctua_nh_u12f needs around a 13mm overhang, sadly i only have 3mm . Assuming 1) is not an issue I may mod the shelf lowering a section it a 3~4 cm to give room.But will try my current XP-90C which should fit without overhang with the right adapter.

Contacted Nvidia today as they are producing the reference board whichare being sold pretty much unmoddedd by likes of EVGA. Hopefully i'll know a littler more b4 getting in touch with abit.

so i'm keeping my fingers crossed
luck

Maybe I need to download a different version of the uGuru but the one I have (from mobo setup disk) only let me adjust to 400. If I up it more than 400 in bios it just indicate 0 FSB. I'll check out the version when I get home.

the new verision of uguru they released not long after the ab9/pro came out goes up to 600mhz.

as my board is one of the first out i think they used a crappy pll as my fsb no matter if set in bios or with uguru in windows is maxed at 396mhz.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v733/Evilsizer/ocforums/Abit ab9 pro/311m18.jpg

ab9 pro is a solid board, im not sure when but with a restocknig sometime in july or later. ab9/pro's have vdimm up to 2.5v where mine is maxed at 2.3v.

for raid i would highly suggest these mobos

abit ab9-pro
asus p5b-dlx non-wifi version
biostar tforce 965p-dlx
gigabyte 965p-dq6

i would say p5b-e but the price difference of it vs the ab9 pro is so small. the main difference between the 2 is p5b-e uses 3-phase power where ab9 has 6-phase.

There's also this DFI Overcomes All Odds to Launch the LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G Motherboard now on Official DFI Site - LANPARTY UT ICFX3200-T2R/GHype sounds ok but yet to see anything concrete. May at least be a candidate for inverted mounting

I downloaded the updated uGuru and yes the setting does goes up to 600. Awesome... now I can have uGuru running above 400.

with all the quirks being reported on the 680is (HOT AND NOISY!) and the unmature ATI D600 chipset reported here:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2891
P965 is the safe route right now. The ASUS P5B-Deluxe would be my choice. I'm not buying anything until the mainstream ATI DX10 cards are out (MARCH???) so i'll give them all a chance by then

UPDATE:

it seems the i650 chipset fairs pretty well (and is very cheap!!!) against 965p in all aspects. If you dont like crossfire (I dont like the idea of 2 videocards anyway) and still be able to run SLI look at the asus p5n-e SLI

http://www.ocforums.com/showpost.php?p=4856950&postcount=3