Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

It has come to that time to build a new computer from scratch and so far I have chosen the following:

C2D E6600 - £140.94
Either this board (Gigabyte GA 945GM) which is only £42.89 or maybe one of the Gigabyte I965 board which come in at about £64 or so.
(link to them all)

The Power Supply - this one seems to have caught my eye (Xilence 420W PSU) for £29.32

Now my question is really, which is a decent price vs. features/performance motherboard I should be looking at. I am not bothered if it is mATX or full size but must feature 4 x Memory slots (DDR-2). Not really bothered also about 2 x PCI-Express but over clocking might be good but not an area which I am into or have tried with much success.

Is the Power Supply for example good enough? At the moment I will be sticking in a Gegorce 7600GT but maybe later might upgrade as the need arises - what spec does the 8800 or ATI ones need for example?

Any help would be great, I would rather spend the extra money now then have sub-standard parts type thing.

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

The 8800 or the X2600XT will require a lot of power, so on the safe side i'd be looking at a Kilowatt PSU.

As for motherboard, i have a 965p-DS3, which is rock solid, overclocks well as long as your RAM can take it, and so on... Really nice board.

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

PSU seems a little cheap maybe a nice seasonic ,as far as motherboards are concerned you will need to balance specs up and decide what you need and dont have a look at the manuals and see . I had a bit of bad luck with a DS3 but there liked as is the S3

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

PSU : Corsair HX-620 enough ump, quality and silence but you're looking at a ton inc but its worth it.

Mobo : My current fav is the DS3P not the DS3 or the p5n-e sli both are cheap and allow easy overclocking.

CPU Fan : ninja, tuniq or ultimately my choice : Noctua NH-U12F (Socket)

With that setup you'll get a good overclock from you CPU.

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

linky to the cooler dude I want a better one

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

As per usual I'm sure you can get it cheaper :)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...=57&subcat=821

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

Ta mate :)

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

Thanks for all your advice everybody that replied, I have now placed the order which is as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Retail
ASUS P5N-E SLi NF650i 775
Seasonic 430w S12 Power Supply (yes I know only 430W but it got a good review)
Patriot 2GB Kit PC5300 667MHz 4-4-4-12
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 PRO
Not bad deal - the lot inc postage etc for about £300

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

aria??? did you do it cleverly and order each bit and get a tenner off with google checkout? (ok with all the delivery extras you couls save £5 per deal)

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

Yes indeed - why? is it cheaper elsewhere??
Ah Bugger nope - thought it was a One Off thing - damm - too late now I guess

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

lol I know they are doing the patriot ram cheap ;) no its ANY order over 30 quid

Will be a good machine for that. Prices are wicked aint they now its never been so good :)

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

Nice budget machine which will get you far - a bit trickier overclocking with the RAM you got but it's not impossible.
AC Freezer Pro is OK but I found the fixtures a bit flimsy but if you get a good contact you should be able to get a minimum of 25% overclock from you CPU (oh reminds me you should have got some arctic silver pro thermal paste to apply between the CPU and the Cooler)

As so far as overclocking is concerned the C2Ds are one of the easiest CPUs I have found to overclock good luck.

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

but the board will let you set the ram to 533 and overclock the cpu without overclocking the ram . Also I read somewhere that the compound on the artic cooling freezer 7 is as good

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

Yeh the RAM should be locked as default (thought I wrote that :rolleyes: ) otherwise overclocking cheap RAM together with CPU would be a no no.

Nonetheless having said that I do like Patriot RAM as it does have some clocking ability albeit at the expense of CAS :)

ACF7 compound - I'll take your word for it ;)

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

http://www.arctic-cooling.com/further_prod2.php?idx=60 little thing by Artic cooling ok silver 5 isnt there but ceramique is

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

Almost forgot the pending release of bearlake P35 chipsets

And so it might be worthwhile getting a p5k next week when its released :

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles...?cid=6&id=2253

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=142841

This should future proof you so that at least you can upgrade to penryn cpus when they come out without the hastle of buying a new board too.

Information is light on the ground as to how well the P5k will overclock but at least it carries the excellent intel CH sata controller

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

but then your left with a cpu on its own. I often find it easier to shift bundles. My plan for later this year is a Penryn on a Bearlake or similar ddrIII supporting chipset with either a single R600 based xtx or 2 xt's. That will leave me a full bundle to move on a lot easier than single parts

---------- Post added at 14:39 ---------- Previous post was at 14:36 ----------

The problem with those Asus boards are they are either or memory controllers where the P35 supports both II and III and memory costs may well decide my route

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

I guess your right but I tend to do it this way as by the time I have that spare CPU I'll be able to get hold of a cheap mobo(depreaciated from 2days prices) to marry it with ;)

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

I had read about the Bearlakes earlier on this week but im surprised to see Asus boards coming without dual memory capability seeing as the P35 does support both making a restriced board seems strange

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

From the XS preview they hit a fsb of 575MHz (yes it was with an engineering sample cpu) but still thats an insane fsb! the i975x flakes out around 450MHz the i965 (what this chipset replaces) can do 500MHz at a push.

575 as most of the people in that thread are in awe is just that amazing

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

Do you have a forward plan or do you play it by ear? if you have a plan what is it :)

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

got one of these coming monday big job to install it,its a tataol strip down the whole thing weighs in at 740 g:Yikes:

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

You will enjoy it - trust me ;)

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

New system is not happy, let me tell you of the long story so far:

Parts arrived and I put this together in a bog standard case I had lying around, it has a Side fan and a top fan already fitted, side Fan Blowing in and Top fan sucking out. Now I fitted the whole lot and the HSF was so big that it overlapped the HS on the motherboard but it ran anyhow and the Temp's were 30c rising upto 35 and on load something in the region of 40+ type thing.

Now the system was Very noisey indeed and it was at this stage I had to find out what the problem was, after much investigation, the 7600GTFan was on all the time and making most of the noise, with that out of the system for example it was almost silent (and if you removed the 2 case fans).

What I did in the end (and this might be wrong) was have to top fan blowing down into the case (stream of cold Air for the Fan on the CPU) and the side fan replaced with a no-connected one. I placed 2 x Fans on the back blowing out of the case , top one still blowing down into the case and a front one sucking air in.

Anyhow, system ran fine for days on end and tonight for example I fired up a game of BF2, had done this many times through the week and no problems came about - half way through a 2nd
match my system rebooted and I was met with one long Beep, pause beep again and so forth. Looking this up on another system says its a RAM Fault. I replaced the ram from my Other machine (only DDR533) and the system worked. I tried the ram one stick at a time in the other machine and it was then one of the stick were dead.

I asked myself at this time, was the fans in the case the wrong way and enough heat built up and thus fried the ram? They are Patriot and have heat spreaders on and by god they were hot as well. Surely the Air coming from the top down was enough to cool these? I Put my hand (without touching anything) and could feel the Air no problems next to the ram chips.

Now the annoying part, I have to RMA both of them (thus system is out of action) and post them via Royal Mail - I am not sure if the cost is given back to you. I know from SCAN for example they sent a new part and swapped my broken part at the door, all next day. Thus the perils I guess of Buying online.

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

Hope you had not been a nawty boy and dabbled in a bit of overclocking ?

Were all the BIOS settings @ default ?

How high were your temps ?

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

No OverClocking has taken place, I was wanting to make sure everything ran fine @ Stock Values. As for Temp's, on Idle the CPU was 32c and on full Load (say a game) it hit about 40c which was not high I am sure. The Case Temp was 38c Idle and went as high as 45c on full load.

Now some might say the Top Fan there was the problem, should have been sucking air out of the case, with this set as such - the temp went up actually, 37 idle and so forth.

Every single time I had taken the side of (to see what the noise was about before) and checking by hand the Temps of things, the ram was never hot - this time it was, very hot...

EDIT:
I have the 3 Sticks of Ram in there at the moment, the system the same setup, ran a game for ages and shut the machine down. I Checked the Temp of the Ram by hand, cool as I was expecting - maybe a dodgy slab?

Re: Good C2D Motherboard choice?
 

You mean motherboard temperature right ?

Again normal.

Maybe you have just been unlucky mate :sorry: