Ok, here's the situation. I have a q6600 quad core processor. I really want to over-clock it as far as possible on air cooling. Right now, its attached to my crappy dell stock motherboard from the inspiron 530. The kind of board i want is, one very stable with over-clocking, maybe 2 pci-e 16 slots, roomy, and can take 800mhz ram. I do not desire to buy additional ram, as Im on a budge that is tighter than an Ant's buttcrack. So any suggestions? Oh, price range is below $100, the lower the better, but.....and only if....... the mobo is really kick-azz, i can manage to pinch a few more bucks if its really worth it. I have searched myself, but all I know is I need a 775 board, and after that, when it starts talking about 45nm, 60nm i get confused. Here is what i have so far to go in it. 600 watt psu (with 2 6pins connectors) zalman cnps quiet cooler and/or aio liquid cooling (hey, i told yall i was on a budget, and i was up for experimenting, lol) (ive been strugglin to upload pics of it, and cant remember my photobucket acct info, haha) ati radeon 4890 4gb of (ddr2) 800mhz ram thats all i think.
Take a look at the Gigabyte GA-EG41MF-US2H, that's the mobo i use. Good oc-ing, good price. Only 1 pci-e though. Its a bit picky with ram but takes up to 8 gb. FYI, if you are using ram in all 4 dimms you will need single sided ram modules for this mobo. Definitely worth checking Gigabytes memory support list. On the whole though, its a great board and oc-ing is very simple thanks to the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker. Also worth noting is the fact it has Dual Bios.... Very handy indeed.
Thnx Alex. I checked out that mobo, and the ram looks likes its going to be a major problem, and plus some other guys were saying that if you have a big gfx card, which i do, it will cover up to of the sata ports, making them useless. So, this looks like this is not an option. I was curious about how much this one cost. SO how much did yours cost you?
I paid £62 for mine, cheap really but good fo the price. I can see how a large gpu would be an issue regarding the sata ports. A shame really.
Ye a cheep ASUS P5Q SE2, i have a q6600 OC to 3.6ghz on that serie. I use a Noctua NH-U12P SE2 cooler, and still extrem hot . If you want to clock the chip more than 3.6ghz, you probobly need a watercooler.
you might want to get faster RAM (1066) considering the FSB speed of the Q6600 is 1066 (267 quad pumped) You would need a decent board that can control DRAM voltage if you're gonna get DDR2 1066 aswell, as DDR2 1066 requires a manual voltage bump as its not in the SPD of the RAM. I'd personally put the 1066 RAM in there running at 800mhz in there so you can raise the FSB slowly getting closer to 1066 and OC'ing your CPU at the same time.