Best Gaming Motherboard for OCing an E8400 w/ Single GPU?

Oc1Kenube said:

Msi p35 platinum is a great and under rated mobo imo, 500fsb is easily achievable which will help with the x8 multi on the E8400

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Yes the MSI P35 Platinum board is nice as well. But here would be my advice.

We should be seeing the P45 shortly. If you need to build now, Get either an Asus P5E or the Gigabyte X38-DS4. Both very solid basic boards with full Crossfire support and PCI-E 2.0 spec. If he does not plan to upgrade anytime soon, I think the choice is clear and get yourself a X38 board.

Oc1Kenube said:

Msi p35 platinum is a great and under rated mobo imo, 500fsb is easily achievable which will help with the x8 multi on the E8400

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*cough*

The p35 platinum is almost as ill as the Neo-Fi. I'm talking about oveclocking Quadcores on those boards, especially extremes.
Some components near the cpu-socket gets hot. And i mean really HOT. About 193Celsius with the platinum and 225C with the Neo-Fi.. So it's not a good choice if you're gonna overclock other than duos.

We had a test on our swedish board confirming these heat-issues with a temp-gun. The Neo-Fi burned in hell and never started after OCing, the Platinum wasn't long gone..

To bad thou.. it seems to be nice otherwise.


http://www.sweclockers.com/imagebank/200707/Msi7001.jpg Platinum
http://www.sweclockers.com/imagebank/200707/Neo8001.jpg Neo-Fi
Neo-Fi burned http://www.sweclockers.com/imagebank/200707/Neo7001.jpg

Skillz any voltmods on that board that fried itself?

prolly not.. msi has had some AM2+ boards kill them self as well,all over XS forums... due to the lack of PWM phase to supply the current of the higher TDP cpus. the AM2+ board i talk of was speced to work ok with 89watt cpus, yet those that oced fried there boards since TDP was approching 110+watts. that shows the importance of the phase of PWM's for the cpu. the higher the phase the higher TPD the board can support and further the ocing that board can do. as any board with 3phase will be ok for stock quads and mildly oced duals. for oced quads you want at least 4phase for mild clocks with higher for higher oces, i would call mild a 25-35% oc..

Dawgdoc said:

Skillz any voltmods on that board that fried itself?

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Nope, 100% stock!


Evilsizer, yepp! about the same conclusion we came to!

All this PCIe speculation is nice and all, but there are other factors as well. Nehelem will be out by EOY. In 2 yrs it will have a firm foothold. What's to say that at that point in time that games won't need what the new platform brings to the table. Sure, games are GPU limited now, but who knows what will happen down the road. Heck, AMD might have a CPU and GPU in a single package that will blow away anything we can think of now.

Point is, and has been stated, go w/ what's good now (MARS, P5K-Premium, IP35Pro), and worry about 3 yrs from now when you get there.

OT: DawgDoc, nice work on the MARS board! My interest has been peaked on that thing since Windwithme's thread. I may have to pick one up if I can get 4GHz on my 8 multi x3210. What voltage was that 4.6GHz run at on your x3220, and is that stable? If not, how high can you get it stable?

No not anywhere near what you would consider stable Jason

I was running somewhere around 1.95-2.0V on dice to get 4500+, but It was indeed stable to bench many programs that high as well. Certainly not SPi 32M, but 1M yes Pifast yes, etc....just not the longer more intense benches.

I think I can get a weeeee bit more on LN2, but havnt had a chance to try it yet.

Can we update the X32X0 thread with new info for me?

J/K of course man....those are just silly screenies for benching and not meant to be compared to non-bench stuff

Did you ever try to see how high you could get the FSB on the MARS board w/ air compared to the P5K-Premium?

Yeah, I haven't done all that super cold stuff yet...not sure if I'll ever do it, but who knows? I just volt-modded my gfx card, and that was a first. Check out the pics!

I have not.....I should.

P5K premium max FSB on air X3220 was.......in the 490s actually. Pretty dang good!

Never did anything on air on the Mars yet other than install windows

Its in RMA now, but Ill give it a go when I get it back.

Nice work on the voltmods! For the Molex wires, if they are too thick and big you can solder them to a smaller wire, cover with your plastic wire covers as you did near the VRs, and then use that smaller wire to solder to the resistors/SMDs. Sometimes it helps alot if you have a small resistor.

What gauge wire did you use for the non-molex mods?

Good work man! Just be careful with your voltages if you are using air. Might wanna consider adding some extra sinks to the memory and some of the other important chips. I have been told that the NV/IO chip is particularly important to cool in the G92 GTS but I have no personal knowledge Im juts parroting someone who does alot of GPU VMods.

I have everything sinked on the card that I can think of.

This is a GT, but the idea is the same.

I've got a HS on the (1) chip shown in the pic, and the hot SMC area (3) as well. And then all the RAM chips and areas shown sinked in the pic above. The 1 thing I don't like about this HR03GT is that 2 of the RAM chips have to be covered w/ these dinky little HS's and the heatpipes traverse directly over them; radiating heat, I'm sure. But, I have a good fan on the GTS, and fans blowing all around it. I have a 25cm fan below the gfx card blowing up, a 25cm fan blowing in from the side window. Plus the 2 front 120's blowing in, & the 120 & (2) 90's exhausting. The card gets up to 56*C when playing Crysis @ the stats in my sig.

That's 30AWG wire. The vGPU, and vMem readpoints were nice and big, so I just got those thicker wires bent into position, so that they basically were making contact w/o even soldering. A quick touch w/ the iron, and it was golden!

I'm liking the Gigabyte X38-DS4... especially after the X48 boards begin to appear. It's on my short list at NewEgg. As has been said in other posts, there are lots of things going on... multi-core processors are just getting started. The 80 core chip at Intel they were testing was, well, 80 cores. Who knows where things will be in a couple of years....

Blessings to all,
ms




eta: spellun

mormonsniper said:

I'm liking the Gigabyte X38-DS4... especially after the X48 boards begin to appear. It's on my short list at NewEgg. As has been said in other posts, there are lots of things going on... multi-core processors are just getting started. The 80 core chip at Intel they were testing was, well, 80 cores. Who knows where things will be in a couple of years....

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I'd planned on buying the ASUS Rampage Formula based on this review

But like you I'm leaning towards the X38-DS4, I just can't justify waiting 4-6 weeks for a 5% performance boost

recession sucks