What Makes a Good OC Motherboard ?

Simmonz

Simmonz

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When looking for a motherboard to be used for overclocking what features should one look for ? Sometimes sites like [H] may not have reviewed some boards that are available in my area. I know there is nothing that will be able to say that a board will guarantee a good overlclock but I know there must be good things to look for.
 
I can't speak to AMD boards, but what I look for is:

PCI-e enable / disable switches
Externally accessible CMOS clear switch
Dual BIOS or better.

Other stuff like number of PCB layers, # of VRM phases, waterblock pre-attached to the VRMS (Asus Maximums VI Formula had this), voltage monitoring points, etc and their importance depends on what you're trying to do.

Avoid smaller mobo companies like MSI or Biostar or whoever else because they won't spend as much time tweaking the BIOS to get better overclocks.
 
dr/owned said:
I can't speak to AMD boards, but what I look for is:

PCI-e enable / disable switches
Externally accessible CMOS clear switch
Dual BIOS or better.

Other stuff like number of PCB layers, # of VRM phases, waterblock pre-attached to the VRMS (Asus Maximums VI Formula had this), voltage monitoring points, etc and their importance depends on what you're trying to do.

Avoid smaller mobo companies like MSI or Biostar or whoever else because they won't spend as much time tweaking the BIOS to get better overclocks.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tips. I notice higher end boards like the Crosshair V will have extra ports for power. It has an extra 4 pin for the CPU as well as a molex on the board. Probably useful when you need to handle higher wattage.
 
I disagree about the MSI and Biostar assessment. MSI in particular can overclock just as high as the competition.

Extra 4/8 pin for the CPU is only relevant for high end 1366/2011 platforms on water to the max, or LN2 overclocking. Otherwise, power draw is low enough to be handled by one set of 8-pins.

The extra molex/sata/PCI-E on the motherboard (it varies depending on motherboard and company) is for multi-GPU setups, so that the 24-pin connector isn't stressed as much (there have been cases of it melting on tri/quad SLI/Crossfire

Also, with current Intel platforms, your motherboard choice matters little as long as there's VRM cooling and it's not bottom barrel (sub $110 boards). 90% of your overclocking result will be dependent on silicon lottery.
 
Simmonz said:
Thanks for the tips. I notice higher end boards like the Crosshair V will have extra ports for power. It has an extra 4 pin for the CPU as well as a molex on the board. Probably useful when you need to handle higher wattage.
Click to expand...

An 8 pin CPU Connector can handle about 300W of power. So an 8+4 board's top end would be 450W going to the CPU. An insanely high voltage 4-core will at most be in the 350-400W range. Realistically a single 8 pin can handle all but the most extreme overclocks for a 4 core. An 8 core 8+4 is really a smart idea (5960X 8 core, not the fake AMD 8 cores).
 
dr/owned said:
Avoid smaller mobo companies like MSI or Biostar or whoever else because they won't spend as much time tweaking the BIOS to get better overclocks.
Click to expand...

Smaller?! MSI is one of the largest oem motherboard manufacturers out there if I'm not mistaken.
 
dr/owned said:
An 8 pin CPU Connector can handle about 300W of power. So an 8+4 board's top end would be 450W going to the CPU. An insanely high voltage 4-core will at most be in the 350-400W range. Realistically a single 8 pin can handle all but the most extreme overclocks for a 4 core. An 8 core 8+4 is really a smart idea (5960X 8 core, not the fake AMD 8 cores).
Click to expand...

What the hell kind of quad core cpu is consuming 300w? Does that even happen under ln2?

The extra molex on the board is probably for the pci-e slots. I wouldn't run tri-fire/sli on a board without one. Probably not a bad idea for dual cards that suck a ton of juice either.

I'm pretty fond of gigabyte. Good price for performance generally. Asus, has the best features no doubt about it but it comes at a premium and their support is shit. For example, my Z77 UD5a has pretty crappy pwm control options and doesn't overclock memory as well as it should. I also don't know if MSI has fixed their wonky loadline calibration.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
What the hell kind of quad core cpu is consuming 300w? Does that even happen under ln2?

The extra molex on the board is probably for the pci-e slots. I wouldn't run tri-fire/sli on a board without one. Probably not a bad idea for dual cards that suck a ton of juice either.

I'm pretty fond of gigabyte. Good price for performance generally. Asus, has the best features no doubt about it but it comes at a premium and their support is shit. For example, my Z77 UD5a has pretty crappy pwm control options and doesn't overclock memory as well as it should. I also don't know if MSI has fixed their wonky loadline calibration.
Click to expand...

First gen Nehalems could consume up to 200 watts on water I'm fairly sure, and will probably do 300 watts on LN2. But yeah, none of today's quad-cores are capable of consuming 300 watts under any condition. Or 200 watts on water.
 
Tsumi said:
First gen Nehalems could consume up to 200 watts on water I'm fairly sure, and will probably do 300 watts on LN2. But yeah, none of today's quad-cores are capable of consuming 300 watts under any condition. Or 200 watts on water.
Click to expand...

First gen Nehalems could easily do over 200w overclocked even on air. That's only 70w over the stock TDP. (i7-920)
 
dr/owned said:
I can't speak to AMD boards, but what I look for is:
PCI-e enable / disable switches
Externally accessible CMOS clear switch
Dual BIOS or better.
Other stuff like number of PCB layers, # of VRM phases, waterblock pre-attached to the VRMS (Asus Maximums VI Formula had this), voltage monitoring points, etc and their importance depends on what you're trying to do.
Avoid smaller mobo companies like MSI or Biostar or whoever else because they won't spend as much time tweaking the BIOS to get better overclocks.
Click to expand...

Symptoms of high-end boards...
 
cyclone3d said:
First gen Nehalems could easily do over 200w overclocked even on air. That's only 70w over the stock TDP. (i7-920)
Click to expand...

TDP has nothing to do with actual power consumption though.

Although digging into the topic a bit, xbitlabs measured the Phenom II 965 C3 pulling 190 watts at 3.9 ghz, which it was perfectly capable of doing on air.

That said, 6-pin PCI-E is perfectly capable of handling 250+ watts. 8-pin EPS would be able to handle 330+ watts.

And yes, AMD 8 core processors can consume as much power as Intel 6 and 8 core processors. That says nothing about their computational ability however.
 
I find it extremely hard to believe that a Nehalem cpu draws anywhere near 200w on air.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
Are we talking system power consumption? How were these measurements taken?
Click to expand...

They were measuring the amperage on the 12v CPU line. Which in their testing, reached 15.9 amps.

Granted, the CPU was a 1.5v, which is rather high for a Phenom II.

Here's the link to the article I forgot to include: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/power-consumption-overclocking_6.html

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/power-consumption-overclocking_11.html#sect0 i7 950 D0 at 4.2 ghz can consume over 200 watts. I'm almost sure most i7 D0 can hit 4.2 ghz with high end air.
 
That's total system power consumption measured at the wall. What the cpu is pulling from the psu is much, much less than that
 
Read the article. They're measuring the 12v amperage. The very bottom graphs show that.
 
Could you run 1.4v on air on that cpu? I mean reliably?

Still even at that voltage thats more than I was expecting. The extra 200mhz doesn't seem to be worth it to me.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
What the hell kind of quad core cpu is consuming 300w? Does that even happen under ln2?

The extra molex on the board is probably for the pci-e slots. I wouldn't run tri-fire/sli on a board without one. Probably not a bad idea for dual cards that suck a ton of juice either.

I'm pretty fond of gigabyte. Good price for performance generally. Asus, has the best features no doubt about it but it comes at a premium and their support is shit. For example, my Z77 UD5a has pretty crappy pwm control options and doesn't overclock memory as well as it should. I also don't know if MSI has fixed their wonky loadline calibration.
Click to expand...

3770K at 1.585V under water was a bit over 300W. Price of 5Ghz. My 5960X is around 500W / 48A across 2 8 pin connectors. I'm an extreme case though. Most people will run out of cooling before they get into insane power draws.
 
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