I bought the MSI 965 platinum mobo, following on from THG recommendation:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2006 [...] age21.html


It seemed perfect - stable, mid priced, full of features and was only a modest overclocker, preventing me from making my PC go bang. They did however get a FSB of 346MHz with an E6700.


So recently I increased my cooling and got everything working nicely and thought I'd give it an OC and see how I got on.
But then I stumbled across a review on a website called Custom PC : http://www.custompc.co.uk/ that seemed to suggest that they had 2 mobo's to review. The first blew the southbridge at 300MHz and the second corrupted the SATA drivers at 300MHz. They finally got it stable at 290Mhz.

I don't fancy blowing the southbridge, so should I count my loses and stick to stock speeds.
Seems almost pathetic to only take the FSB to 290MHz compared to others monster overclocks.

this is going to be one of those cases where every opinion will be just that, an opinion.

Those safty minded, or those who have blown a board in the past, will tell you to play it safe.

Those who dont care, will tell you to risk it.

Ultimately, it's up to you. I'm a "play it safe" guy, so i say dont risk it. but that's just me.

well he's right just dont risk your motherboard, i did it and now i have to wait to buy another one

I wouldn't risk overclocking on a board that isn't known for achieving a good overclock. I specifically bought my Gigabyte P965-DS3 because it was fairly universally accepted as an awesome overclocker.

So, with your MSI board, if you're seeing a trend of reviews that it doesn't OC well, then I would say play it safe. With a DS3 or similar, go for the max clock you can squeezes out.

Side note: Even when various OC settings failed on my DS3 during the OC process, it didn't seem to cause any corruption or other problems.

The answer is in your username.

All my PC spec's components were bought souly for overclocking. As long as you do stability testing after an OC, Orthos, Memtest, Everest to name a few your safe. Just make sure that your CPU, GPU are running at safe temps and volts. If you make sure everything is stable and have safe temps you will be just fine overclocking. Just use commen sence.

Maybe their stupidity was too much for the SB to handle? Or maybe it was the PCIe bus they increased to 300MHz and not the FSB [/blue smoke]

Most PCI-e busses don't even like 150MHz. Some mobo's lock it at 100.