Ideal mobo for E8400 (in 2009)
 

Hi All

It's all your fault MadShrimps. :mad:

After reading that E7400 vs E8600 article, I got myself an E7400. Not satisfied with it, I then went to get a E8400.
What a brilliant chip has it been! So brilliant in fact that I managed to kill one of my motherboard's memory lanes :D

Good news it is still under warranty. Soooo, I'm in the very fortunate position to pick a mobo that is better suited for getting the most out of an E8400.

So, dear Madshrimpians, what do you suggest?

P.S. Running single card, not bothered about Crossfire or SLI.

Overclocking minded boards: http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&articID=841

Thanks Jmke

In terms of 2009 prices what do you think makes more sense?

if you're not into (extreme) overclocking, any fully featured P45 motherboard with DDR2 (cheaper) or DDR3 (future proof) will do:)

It depends how you define extreme...but i'm not prepared to do anything more than adding an extra fan to blow on the Northbridge and my Ultra 120 extreme. Also, I'm looking for a 24/7 overclock and probably nothing past 4GHz.

If P45 chipset: Asus or Gigabyte?

I do have the option to go X48. Is P45 still the better choice?

Also, I forgot to say that I would like to try 8*500 but nothing past that.

About any P45 could do 500 fsb I guess.

any recent P45 of known OC brands will reach that goal; now what brand to choose comes down to price and extra's you want/need :)

EDIT: Yes, I forgot to mention that I run DDR2-1000, which can do 4-4-4-12 at 500MHz.

Well, the site offers Gigabyte, Asus, and MSI.
I'm not pleased with MSI so I'd rather avoid it.

The ones costing about the same as the one I'm returning (£119) are:

I was thinking of going for the Asus P5Q but it appears to have some significant USB problems.
And here .

(I apologise for blabbing too much...)

I've done some research and narrowed everything down to:

As I said, I would like to try 8*500. Does anyone have any experience with any of these two?

I went and got the ASUS, which I think it is better because it offers additional BIOS options, which allow it to consistently hit higher OCs than the Gigabyte one. I am talking about the GTL options, as per this thread.

I will be posting OC results this weekend.

either one should do fine; P45 based motherboards with OC friendly bios tend to scale nicely towards 500, or higher:)

The ASUS P5Q-E is freakin' awesome :super:

I don't know if the Gigabyte is/could be just as good but from the reviews I found online it couldn't do this:



or this...;-D



What you see as 'Performance Level' in MemSet, is the infamous tRD timing. In the ASUS BIOS is under 'Ai transaction Booster', labelled as 'Common Performance Level'.
(I don't know why they couldn't just leave it as tRD...)

nice results :)

Secret of P45 is to run the rams on a divider... 600FSB is doable on both boards for benching...UD3P is the best benching mobo

I ran 500FSB too with 1200mhz on the rams...

Do NOt run auto voltages on the Asus boards plz. They seriously overvolt (PLL and FSB Term go crazy with AUTO) Also NB is best kept under 1.35 for daily use, as it's stability is very heat sensitive....

Can you check with CPU-Z (mainboard tab) which version of the P45 you got mate ? Asus boards were all Rev 1's , Giga was Rev 2

Sure...



Not to worry, my vNB is 1.18 ;-D

I was hoping to try 1:1 at 600. Do you think it'd be possible?

For a benching session yes, 24/7 absolutely a no. But you will need to tweak the Skews and GTL's to get pi 32m stability. For just a screenie it's easy, stability that's something else. I went slowly 580-590-595 and finally 600FSB

This was at 4.2, I tried it due to that bad CPU :) ( EIST enabled )

No, I won't bother then. I want something I can run 3D games on.

Can you give us an Everest RAM bandwidth screenie?

That is a lot of voltage on the CPU. Water-cooling?

Your BIOS is rather old. Any reason?

I had a few P5Q dlx's mate and last bios I used was 15xx series. Newer bios isn't always better as we had very good results with 8 series biosses.

That CPU needed for 4Ghz (8x 500) 1.45Vcore to be stable. Once you start pushing FSB you need to give the CPU more vcore too for the same final clockspeed. Same for my Qx9650 for 4ghz ops ( 445 x 9 ) I needed 1.26Vcore, for 8 x 500 1.36Vcore.