Motherboard – Gigabyte or MSI with P35 chipset
Our price limit for the motherboards was €99. Also, we wanted it to work with Intel’s 45 nm generation of processors, expected to be released next year. Thus, the boards need to support these CPUs out of the box. That narrowed down our choice to the P35 chipset, since these boards are quite affordable and also use the ICH9, which is currently Intel’s fastest southbridge. Additionally, the chipset works with DDR2 memory. Memory prices being as low as they currently are, this lets you build a very affordable system.
Gigabyte and MSI offer two very attractive lines of boards, namely the GA-P35-DS3 line and the P35 Neo2 family, respectively.
| Board | Price | Firewire | RAID | SATA | IDE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L | €81 | Yes | Yes | 4 | 1 |
| Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 | €85 | Yes | No | 6 | 1 |
| Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R | €93 | Yes | Yes | 8 | 1 |
| MSI P35 Neo2-FR | €92 | No | Yes | 7 | 1 |
| MSI P35 Neo2-FIR | €98 | Yes | Yes | 7 | 1 |
These boards are available with different feature sets. We decided on the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 and the MSI P35 Neo2-FIR. Feature set has no impact on performance or overclocking potential, so you can choose any board from these families depending on your needs.
Sadly, we weren’t able to include an affordable board by motherboard maker Asus. Our request for a board was declined on the grounds that only expensive high-end models are sent out as review samples. Cheaper boards, on the other hand, are not included in the press portfolio. Apparently, Asus is not interested in having its less expensive boards reviewed.
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so what you just said, is the newer stuff is better
i dont know why they take 10 pages to show what can be said in 1 page + a few graphs
On top of that Crysis is meant to be very cpu dependant and prefers 4 cores - it's the way things are going
Hmm, if they'd have gone for a different motherboard they could have gotten the q6600 to 3.6 on air.
Dunno if you have a duff chip or mobo. I have a Q6600 and exactly the same cooler and I can do 3.41 GHz at stock voltage on a Gigabyte 965P-DS3P.
"Its stock clock speed is 2.4 GHz, which it operates at using a comparatively low core voltage of 1.3125 Volts – the lowest core voltage available for this chip"
Wrong my Q6600 is 1.26V although it runs slightly higher in practice.
http://i152.photobucket.com/albums [...] s/Quad.jpg
I guess this shows how OC'ing can vary depending on luck. Even hand picking the best S numbers is no guarantee. A bit of luck (unless you have deep pockets) can be key.
Fortunately for myself, my Q6600 is 1.28v core, and hits 3.6GHz with only slight bump.
Indeed electron migration is a significant issue at high Vcore but realistically most of us overclocking are probably running 6-12 month cycles on our hardware (at least from my experience) and the cost of killing a mid range part every year against taking a top end part is still more cost effective.
That's given only one CPU in the past 15 that I've OC'd have failed (possibly luck?) on me and that was due to a faulty voltage regulator on my motherboard
Very nice review/test. Highly informative. I was gonna buy a 6850 or a quad core but now im just gonna grab the low cost msi board and a 6750 and spent my cash elsewhere.
question, you end up recommending the MSI motherboard, but the test system states that you used the gigabyte for the test. Will i be able to get the same clocking abilities with the MSI?