So after 4 months of living with an Asus P5B-VM motherboard, which frankly had no decent overclocking features, and issues supporting my 2x1Gb OCZ667's @ more than 533, i bit the bullet and bought an EVGA nForce 650 Ultra board after reading the bit-tech and CPU3D reviews... And goddamn what a board it is for £60. Ok no SLI, no SLI memory, no Firewire, but what id has is oodles of stability and overclocking support. Am now the proud owner of an E6400 @ 3.100Ghz, 1.375v vCore, with that OCZ 667 memory @ 800Mhz on 1.9v If anyone is after a DECENT, stable, and affordable board with support for later CPUs, i would HIGHLY recommend this board! Right....once i've got these updates in, time to try to push to 3.5Ghz! Has anyone had any luck pulling off such a feat?
I got an E6400 stable at 3.65GHz, running superPI at 3.89GHz on air on a P5B Deluxe.. That was a very early stepping so you should get a decent clockspeed out of a newer stepping as long as the board doesn't run out of steam. I'm glad you are happy with your purchase.
\o/ My work is done. Gonna send this to EVGA now What kind of extra cooling have you put on the northbridge and how hot is your southbridge? OK, the board looks like ass but again, if it's in your case and you're not going to see it, who cares if it does the job
vcore is good, assuming CPU temps are decent then 3.5ghz shouldnt be a problem. What FPO/Batch is your CPU, thats usually a good indication of how well the CPU's going to clock. Try and keep temps below ~ 55 deg and you'll be fine, the cooler the better though. Make sure you have additional cooling on the NB, the stock sink + some form of active cooling should be fine for 450+ FSB quite happily assuming you have some semi decent voltage options available to you. Bit more vDimm should net you abit more from the ram too - the 650i clocks ram nicely too which will help things along nicely. Should be safe with 2.1v or so, the additional cooling on the NB will help keep the ram cool also.
Tbh i kinda like the green PCB, kinda oldschool. I have plenty of airflow in the case, so i didn't bother modding the northbridge, but i pulled a passive southbridge cooler of my old K8NNeo4, which tbh i only did out of paranoia. For the record, mine was an A2 model board, which didn't come with the Serial and USB back which was a bit sucky. Upside is that it only has a 4pin 12v line instead of the 8pin 12v.
Thats a nice looking board for £60.. Aren't 8-Pin EPS cables better for stable voltage that the 4-pinners?
C2D's aint so powerhungry as the pentium d class is. So as long he doesnt try extreme oc it should be fine.
