The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Shaff,
No offense, but I would take the Gigabyte Extreme over either one. mainly because of it's superb cooling, and it's 12+2+2 Phase Power Regulation vs the 10 Phase of the EVGA Board, and the uber xtreme has been deactivated. EVGA has had their problems with reliability over the years with high end motherboards. I know they had plenty of problems with nVidia chipset motherboards that never got fully resolved! besides, it's still cheaper by a bunch and has all the bell' s and whistle's known to man!

Respectfully,
Russ

 

i guess thats your choice then, and this is mine

 

well,well the motherboard battle of choice's and opinions ya'll failed to mention Foxconn that would be my next choice if...I could'en get my hands tpower x58 not to many people in here don't have or want this board in here but..i believe it can hold it's own in some certain options...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186163
site
http://www.foxconnchannel.com/en-us/product/Motherboards/detail_spec.aspx?ID=en-gb0000268

rumors got started that foxconn was getting out the motherboard business the whole thing got started after some folks in Europe lost their jobs...
http://www.ninjalane.com/reviews/motherboards/katana_tour

 

Bigwill,
Nothing Foxconn does surprises me. Every odd year they come out with some sort of super motherboard, Only to have it fade into the sunset for lack of support, and disappear! I for one, wish they would either do it or get off the pot! I guess they are so OEM orientated, that they get lost when they do build something decent! Their site is a Train Wreck, trying to find anything. I guess their "Secret Ingredient" is knowledge! If you can find it on their site, you are very lucky, but trying to come up with a manual (even though I clicked on manual) resulted in a blitz of advertising from Foxconn! Everything, in fact except the manual I was looking for!

Russ

 

No, it's not biased, because I'm not looking at the long term reliability of it, that's been known to be the fault of the chipset. However, take a good look at EVGA boards, they're pretty badly put together, and pretty badly supported.
How is a Rampage II gene or P6T6 realistic? Both of them are still in the needless top end section of i7 boards... There's a difference between 'doing it big' and just being damn stupid...
Agreed on the cooling too, the P6T6's cooler is terrible and the Rampage II Gene is obviously a mATX board. Unless someone is building a lightweight LAN PC, there's no need for an i7 in a mATX box.
The only Foxconn boards I ever encounter are cheap OEMs. The high-end ones aren't prevalent in the market at all, and there must be a reason for it.
For me, Gigabyte, DFI and Biostar are the only competitors here. If you were going to risk an Asus board, it'd be a P6T or P6T SE.

 

its not a risk for me bar the p5ne which i dont need to bring up, lol, i havnt had bad asus baords..

 

A fair few people have proven it's a risk for anyone. It's just not a risk you've fallen foul of more than once. After the fourth it gets a bit tedious.

 

lol fair enough

 

well i got the Q9550 and the new OCZ vendetta 2 installed.
i had to take out one of my areo cool 140mm fans on my side panel. the Vendetta is a tall sob.
fired up without a hitch.
passed IBT with ease.
and the temps are awesome. at idle range from 32c-39c at max IBT temps the max only got to 53c on core 0 core 1 50c core2 48c core3 48c
here is some screens of each test.




http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=604485

gonna leave it at 2.83ghz for a week or so, maybe 3 or 4 days seeing i leave my system running24/7(torrnets lol) then take it up to 3.0ghz and so on.steady as she goes. Boozer buddy where every you may be, no im not going to 400mhz first thing..lol jokeing buddy.

 

That's stock for you The temperature differential as soon as you start overclocking a quad is alarming.

 

the most me i have gotten out of my E0 Q9550 was 3996. Push yours now you nuuubb

 

and it certainly wasn't stable - you told me that. Then again, I think a fully functioning P45 board might fare better, especially a Biostar, they're meant to be excellent for overclocking duals, not sure about quads. Now if only there was a way of fitting an Ultima-90 to a chipset cooler... Sadly there are still no third party Gigabyte VRM coolers.

 

i never said it was hell booting into windows i could do at 4.1GHz

3dmark stable was 3996

for everyday i used 3.91GHz

 

not worried about 4.0ghz but i would like to get it up to 3.83ghz maybe friday ill take it up to 3.0-3.2ghz yes i have the itch to do it now but i know better. im actually running dvd rebuilder right now. temps only have gone up to 46c but all 4 cores are at 100%. i would have thought it wouldnt use that much?????

 

well rob i see that you have finally moved up to a Quad. Have fun with it.

 

Rob yes DVD Rebuilder does use most to all of you're CPU. my temps are about 51C using DVD Rebuilder so your temps sound fine. its going to be nice encoding a movie in 30 to 40 mins huh

 

well with my E8400 (gotta love it) i did LoR twin towers in 48 mins

but hell yes 27 mins is awesome. cant wait to OC this puppy and see what my times are

 

Rob,
Take a look here for cooling VRMs and Mosfets!
http://www.enzotechnology.com/air_cooling.htm
They worked very well on my P35-DS3R, and are reasonably inexpensive!

If you have the stock heatsink on the Northbridge, buy a good 40mm fan and screw it right dead center on the heat sink, blowing down. It keeps the overall temps down! Here's the best fan I've found to date!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835129036
It only turns 2200 RPM and moves 6.5 CFM. It's durable, very quiet, and helps lower both the CPU and NB temps, even under load because it cuts down on the heat transfer from the Northbridge to the CPU. It won't cut the NB temp very much, but it does reduce the CPU temp!

Both are highly recommended, especially if you are going to overclock!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Thanks for the links Russ, I'm after some VRM cooling possibly, as I will need it if I change my chipset heatsink for overclocking purposes. I would much rather use a 60 or preferably 80mm fan on a NB cooler, as I would need more airflow than a 40mm could quietly provide.
So far I've seen someone use the MOS-C1 on a similar X48T-DQ6, but 20 of them will take a while to install! I wonder if some of the other versions might fit.

 

Sam,
I was actually pretty amazed at just how good that little 6.5 CFM fan on the stock GigaByte heatsink really worked. While the Motherboard temps remained about the same as without it, the CPU ran 2-3C cooler. When I installed the Enzotech CNB-R1 (http://www.enzotechnology.com/cnb_r1.htm), I was surprised to see it worked almost exactly the same as the stock heatsink with the Antec fan. One of the things I've learned over the years in working on Hospital equipment is that often you come across localized cooling with various small seemingly insignificant fans inside various pieces of equipment. When I questioned the Engineers about it in training classes, their answer was pretty simple. They said that "because of the different sizes of the components being cooled and the design layout of the boards, cabling and other things sticking up, you can get dead spots in the airflow because something is blocking the airflow to a particular component". "Those small fans are there to be sure that this doesn't happen and that there is always air flowing over certain critical components, no matter what may be in the way of the overall airflow". I suggested what you just said, and asked why not use a larger internal fan, and their answer was "It's all about the localization of the airflow, to get adequate airflow exactly where it's needed"! "It's not that you need a lot of airflow, but rather enough so the air that comes out of the heatsink is easier to be picked up by the Cabinet (case) ventilation"! It stirs up the internal air and keeps it moving! They also pointed out that too much airflow can be just as bad as not enough. Too high a CFM, and the air goes through the heatsink too fast to remove a lot of the heat, especially in a dry environment. When you look at the people with 6, 7 or more case fans that have still experienced temperatures higher than they would like, you begin to see the validity in what the engineers told me! That's why I call case ventilation a "Black Art", and I'm still learning it! LOL!!

The first computer I ever tried that on was Oxi! I put a 50mm 2500 RPM 26 CFM fan on the NB heatsink, and the NB temp dropped 11-13C. Now, the NB rarely if ever gets over 40C, as opposed to the 53C+ I was getting before. That's the difference between leaving a red waffle looking mark on the back of your hand and just being uncomfortably warm to the touch. I didn't touch anything else! The case itself has plenty of airflow, it just wasn't getting enough of it through the heatsink. We are now into the middle of it's second summer, and the heat that goes with it, and it runs about as cool as my 7750BE! A little warmer for the CPU, but even encoding doesn't push the CPU above 46-47C. Considering that it's usually 30C or warmer in the front room, it runs amazingly cool as it only has a provision for a single rear 72mm fan. I plan to up that to an 80MM when the fan finally gives up the ghost! No rush though as it's working real well! LOL!

Best Regards,
Russ