ok well its time to upgrade this ol rig of mine. i want an all out gaming/oc monster machine. of course it will be watercooled. i have a polarflo tt block for the cpu and a danger den pump and a heatercore and blah blah. im thinking athlon 64 for this time as i have a p4 northwood 2.4ghz. as far as SLI, i cant afford it so it will only be 1 SLI card until i can get another. ok here comes the questions. which mobo is best for ocing and performance and has sli? asus a8n-sli msi neo diamond(cant remember the name) or the dfi lanparty one ok next one. what processor? please try to keep the cost under 300 bucks. i want good ocing and not to expensive. maybe a 3000+ or 3200+ winchester? next, the best ram i can get. i want max overclockability. something from OCZ? i have an OCZ 520watt PSU so im not worried about power. i know you will probably tell me to read the forums and such, i have and i have been researching. i just want opinons.
the dfi lanparty is the mobo you want for o/c. yes but go for the 3200 venice as will o/c better. the psu is perfect. ram i would say the ocz vx.my own set does 264MHz 2-2-2 at 3.5V. then there is the PQI Turbo but its this one you want: http://www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?ProductID=7706&GroupID=587 these are great at tight itmings but some people have managed 300+ on slacker timings so if you get lucky and get a great clocking cpu you have the chance to fully utilise it 1:1
Motherboard wise you need a dfi one they are arguably the best boards for overclocking. CPU for clocking keep an eye out for the new venice cores they seem to be hitting around 2.7ghz on stock volts and with good water you may see 3ghz. Ram anything with TCCD chips really and your onto a winner.
VX (or other RAM based on "new BH-5") will be great up to 270ish MHz, if you can supply enough voltage to them (as you can with the DFI, highly recommended anyway) and if you can provide decent cooling. That really means a fan over them, heatspreaders do sweet FA as regards cooling and quite often make an overheating problem worse. If you can fit an XP-120 on the board then the fan on that should overhang the ram nicely and take care of that for you (it should fit if you're not running Corsair Pro or some other silly tall ram), otherwise I couldn't recommend it for long-term usage. The other obvious choice RAM-wise is TCCD, it's more expensive than voltage-hungry stuff but it just keeps going as you loosen the timings. Get some Gskill and take it over 300MHz 1:1, if that suits you, but it doesn't come cheap. Venice is the newest 512K cache A64 core (as opposed to the San Diego which has 1MB) and has shown to be a very good overclocker, get one over a Winchester without a doubt, as it shouldn't be much more expensive at the same PR rating and will offer you more performance and hopefully more overclocking potential. And the PSU should be just fine
i said the exact same earlier and kameleon rightly confirmed and added to it. credit where its due mate.
what about the OCZ PC5000 - tuned to work in the DFI nF4 series motherboards, and is garaunteed to run at 313MHz.
Or the new Gskill FF, also designed for DFI NF4 boards. Gotta love what these guys are doing for such a small market <3 @Baldick, could you keep the spam down a little please? You made your points, no need to look for someone to pat you on the back Oh, and welcome to the forums
I'm assuming it's just meant for the DFI but can run in any board at those speeds? It only said 2.8v in the spec IIRC, and great timings (or was that the DDR600? anyways, it was crazy fast DDR) I really like the A8N-SLI and it will overclock well, but DFI is the king of the NF4SLI boards for overclocking. The only reason I'd recommend the A8N over it is because the DFI won't let you use a chipset waterblock (that I know of, someone correct me if they know of one that would fit) when using two graphics cards. My A8N seems to be rock stable at 285HTT. It didn't seem quite there at 300, but now that I think about it I could have introducted about four other things that meant it may have been something other than the board. The only really downer is no chipset voltage control to speak of (that I've found...), other than a vmod.
Ignore this crap, tiredness got the better of my and I read the above wrongly : http://www.dangerdenstore.com/home.php?cat=48 DD supply a pair of their normal Maze4GPU Acetyl blocks, and say they're compatible with the DFI NF4 boards, and they also have low-profile ones too just in case you think you'll run out of room As for HTT limits, the DFI board really seems to be the leader here too, all their boards seem to do well over 300 1:1 if the RAM can hack it. And the voltage options are crazy - chipset and LDT voltage as well as the usual vcore/vDIMM/vAGP stuff.
That'll teach me to post in the wee hours of the morning Sorry, completely misread Firehed's post There are a couple of waterblocks that'll fit on the DFI board, I seem to remember posting links to them before (in Extreme Cooling IIRC) but I can't bring myself to look for them now. I still fail to see the point of WCing a chipset, but yeah the A8N is the only board that has what I would call sufficient room around the chipset area for any kind of cooling other than stock. The MSI board is a good solid board from what I've seen, but just doesnt have anything extra to recommend it like the Asus' layout or the DFI's overclocking.
so i should go for the DFI? even though i cant watercool the chipset i guess that would be ok. ive read that the asus board just doesnt oc as well as others and i want to push this rig to its max
For some reason the OCZ PC4800 seems to get better timings than the OCZ PC5000 when they are at DDR600 A few people have made custom blocks for the DFI and I know some german manufacturers are working on DFI blocks for retail but they'll probably be 1/4". You could ask over at XS if anyone could fashion you a block for a price
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=935956&postcount=4 That was the post I was talking about, there's plenty of information around here if you look
...says he at 4:30am. [edit] Errr WTF, this thread is *old*. How did I even get here? Now I can't even find the delete post button so I'll be sent to Coventry for digging up old threads
