Which is the best OC chipset?

I can't quite afford a motherboard with an 890FX chipset, so is the 890GX chipset a good overclocker? I'm planning on buying a 1055T and overclocking it to at least 4GHz.

...GX is fine and should take your chip to 4Ghz with proper cooling.

What are the chipsets that keen overclockers should avoid? I would also like to run a Crossfire setup with time.

The lower end ones. But really it just depends on the board. I know there are a few good 790xx boards that will overclock well too, just as not all 890xx overclock well.

Hopefully an AMD expert will chime in with a little more details than I have to offer!

Since I'm in NZ, my choices are rather limited. I've basically got this here http://pricespy.co.nz/category.php?l=s60565606&cols=574,783,615&o=produkt_pris_inkmoms#prodlista to choose from. I'd like to spend as little as possible while still having a stable overclocking board.

This is a very good board but older and ~$300
http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=387470

If that's too rich for you it would help to have a budget ... hint, hint

QuietIce said:

This is a very good board but older and ~$300
http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=387470

If that's too rich for you it would help to have a budget ... hint, hint

Click to expand...

Cheers for that; the reason I'm asking is that if a good AM3 board is only slightly cheaper than a socket 1366 board then I'm going to go down the i7 route. I currently have an SLI setup with 2 9800GT cards so I'm trying to weigh up selling both cards and buying an AM3 setup with a 1055T and a good card like an ATI 5850, or get an i7 950 and keep both 9800GT cards, then upgrade to something like a GTX480 in a year or so when prices have come down quite a bit for the video card.

It seems that a good AM3 board is going to cost about 3/4 of the price of an Asus 1366 board P6X58D-E, and the processor and RAM will be a bit more expensive for the i7. Whichever motherboard, CPU and RAM I buy, I'd like to keep it for 3 years so I'm just wandering if the i7 setup will be better in the long term than the 1055T.

I didn't look all the way down the list, I guess. Even an excellent 890FX isn't any more expensive than the board I linked. Take the Asus M4A89TD PRO/USB3 for example. That's pretty much top of the line (excluding what I call the "exotics"):
http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=610957

A little cheaper but still excellent board is the Gigabyte GA-890XA-UD3:
http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=577009

The Gigabyte GA-790XT-USB3 is also a good board:
http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=541147


If you're building a game machine I'd buy the AMD and spend the extra budget money on better video hardware - but that's me.


PS
Just read your post a little closer. You do realize there are AMD board with nVidia chipsets that support SLI?
http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=567189

And any AMD board (regardless of chipset) will run a single nVidia card like the GTX ...

QuietIce said:

PS
Just read your post a little closer. You do realize there are AMD board with nVidia chipsets that support SLI?
http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=567189

And any AMD board (regardless of chipset) will run a single nVidia card like the GTX ...

Click to expand...

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it. So I could buy the Asus M4N98TD EVO that you suggested, and run a 1055T and hopefully squeeze 4GHz out of it, which will definately give most of the i7 processors a good run for their money, and whack in the 9800GT cards that I already have, then in a year from now I can get a good single card. If I do that then I will get better performance in most applications that a stock i7 950, for a much cheaper price.

Yep, the M4N98TD EVO will definitely run SLI no problem.

No one can guarantee the 4.0 GHz but a lot of 1055T's can do that with very good air cooling and almost all reach 3.8 GHz with just good air cooling.



Since I don't run SLI/Crossfire (not much of an FPS gamer) it took me reading your post a couple of times trying to catch that you were only buying the ATi card with the AMD set-up. I lot of people get confused about AMD and SLI or even nVidia cards in general. I can only blame the reviewers for that. I've seen some reviewers that suggest AMD systems won't run nVidia at all, which is absurd. It's the chipset you have to look at for that, not the CPU, and as I said earlier even AMD chipsets will run any single video card ...