So recently i came into a small amount of money, and picked up a PentiumD 820 plus an Intel mATX DQ965GF motherboard. They work fine, and the PD will do until i can get my hands on a C2D on the cheap. The problem however is an irritating one. I was given 2x 1GB PC-2 5400 DDR2 OCZ Gold sticks of ram in exchange for some server parts. Nice ram, and i have no doubt that despite being made for 667, i could get them to 800mhz...however... I cant run them past 533.... Now i've discovered that the damn memory is designed to run at 1.9v, whereas the darn intel board only runs at 1.8, so just wont run stably above 533. So my options are....sell the ram and get normal stuff (don't wanna do that, this stuff should be good), or...the price of an Asus P5B-VM is much less than 2x1GB sticks of any decent ram. If there is no way for me to increase the voltage on the RAM, this board will be slated for a simple desktop for my old man, and mayb the new board is the best bet. So which should i choose, or is there a better mATX board floating around that supports the C2D, has PCI-E 16x and 1x, and 4x or more SATA2 ports?
You might want to wait for reviews of abit's just released F-I90HD (~£75). They already have the best oc AM2 mATX in the nF-M2 nView so if this brings a similar BIOS/functionality ...
