I have never done overclocking. I am not a real gamer. I can't decide if I want to ever mess with trying to do overclocking. I don't really have a lot of extra time if it takes a lot of tweeking. Wouldn't I save money on my motherboard for an i7 920 if I don't want to overclock? Can someone steer me in the right direction with choosing whether to overclock or not. I can't seem to find an article that helps me decide.
As far as I know, it's possible to overclock on (almost) every X58 motherboard, so you won't save money.
i7 is the elite high-end system platform. Every motherboard for it is a top-spec one which has loads of overclocking features. If you get an i7, you can overclock it, simple as that. Where you will save money by not overclocking is not having to buy a powerful cooler.
Even the Asus P6T SE (which is the cheapest X58 mobo) has loads of overclocking options in its BIOS. And i7 920 overclocks very easily to 4GHz, if you have a decent cooler and the processor is D0 revision.
Haha five years ago I bought my mobo thinking I will never overclock. And for the past three years I have been kicking myself for not spending the extra 10 bucks on a mobo that enabled bios overclock. You don't know what your future will hold....
The EX58-UD3R is the cheapest i7 board in the UK, I don't know about the US. (though they are quite similar, £138 vs £140) fez: Depends what you bought, 5 years ago CPUs didn't overclock very well anyway.
Perhapse they would not OC as many MHZ, but the percentage of the overclocks have not changed much since the pentium 2.
My pentium 2 300mhz overclocked 100% stable to 500mhz using a cheap air cooler (got to 550 stable with an Alpha). That is a 66% overclock without crashes or expensive cooling. The same rate is still generaly true for the low-end of the lines.
