WANTED: Motherboard - Need help Filling in the Blanks…

I have the case and water cooling part of my new build completed http://www.theitalianpalace.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=4324

I purchased 2 of these 2GB kits http://shop2.outpost.com/product/5283387 Extreme Patriot Performance DDR2 PDC22G6400LLK and intend to pickup a G0 Q6600. I already have an 8800 GTX I will be transplanting from my old system.

Based my memory, CPU, and cooling setup what would everyone recommend to be the most overlookable chipset / motherboard for this combination? I am not going to do SLI but I do have a secondary PCI-e video card for a third monitor I need to keep so at a minimum I will need 2 PCI-e slots. I will be running Vista 64 Ultimate. I will be doing some games and multi-core stuff like video encoding, etc. I don’t think cooling will be a problem due to my water setup. I have been reading lots of articles and I want to be able to get the q6600 up to around 3.2ghz or so. The memory came in at a great price and seems to be at least somewhat overclockable.

X38 Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 maybe? NVIDIA 680i?

Thanks for any help,

DOM

I'd wait for a few more X38 boards to come out and see what they look like. Either that or just go with a high end P35 board with dual PCIe slots. x4 bandwidth won't hurt you for a secondary video card (7600GT or something like that).

The Blitz Formula is supossed to be a great board. Hard to find, but great.

What's your budget? The Blitz is a good board, but significantly more expensive than a board that would perform 95% as well as the Blitz (same could be said about the DFI Lanparty board).

I just built two puters similar to what you want to build, though I haven't tried an OC on it yet.

Q6600
evga 8800 GTX
2 x 2 GB of patriot extreme DDR800

and for a motherboard i used the evga 680i NF63 board. Here's the newegg link. It has 3 pci-e x16 slots on it which is interesting even though I doubt I'll use them. But it is well laid out and I really liked the board. I'll try an OC soon, but so far I thought the board was great.

Only problem I ran into with the install is with vista 64bit and 4GB of ram...it was always hanging on install of vista64 and then after I finally got it installed the thing would freeze randomly. If i remove a ram stick and leave 2 GB in there, it all runs fine. All ram sticks check out ok...seems to be a windows problem. (an internet search showed people with both nvidia and P35 based boards were experiencing this)

I'll wait for SP1 for vista before I try putting the other ram sticks back in there.

I wouldn't get an NF63 board if you're looking to OC a quad core. It just doesn't do it very well and this is a known problem (see original eVGA 680i AR/TR revision boards as they have just been rebranded as NF63).

I think I read about a Vista bug exactly as you describe. I did a quick search and found this hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777 . Not sure if it will fix your problem but in any event SP1 is in beta and will hopefully go gold soon.

I am torn between going with the new $>280 X38 Gigabyte board now, waiting for a few weeks to see how the X38 reviews and other vendors look, getting a $<180 680i board now, or just waiting for everything to shake out and just hold off for the Penryn quad in Jan / Feb.

Also, what’s the deal with this “EPP Memory” standard with Nvida chipsets? Is it just a marketing thing or does it actually work and useful in the real world? Is the 680i good with Vista (including x64)?

DOM

The EVGA 122-CK-NF63-TR LGA linked in above seems to have some issues with overclocking Quad Core CPUs. I found this 680i SLI 775 A1 Version for $199.99 after $20 rebate from ZZF. Anyone have any experience with this board in combination with a Q6600?

domenic said:

Also, what&#8217;s the deal with this &#8220;EPP Memory&#8221; standard with Nvida chipsets? Is it just a marketing thing or does it actually work and useful in the real world? Is the 680i good with Vista (including x64)?

Click to expand...

EPP basically means the ram has, stored in itself, some performance profiles that boards supporting EPP will use. It saves you the trouble of setting the timings in the BIOS. Its just a marketing gimmick, imo, lol. Its not hard to set them in the BIOS. I wouldnt base any of my purchasing decisions on the EPP feature.

domenic said:

The EVGA 122-CK-NF63-TR LGA linked in above seems to have some issues with overclocking Quad Core CPUs. I found this 680i SLI 775 A1 Version for $199.99 after $20 rebate from ZZF. Anyone have any experience with this board in combination with a Q6600?

Click to expand...

Yes, as kirbyrj pointed out, the NF63's are rebranded AR/TR boards, which are notorious for not being able to OC a quadcore.

Many people are running the Q6600 and the NF68 A1 revision board. It overclocks nicely.

The only problem I'd see you running into is your 4 sticks of RAM. Many boards have problems powering that 4th stick, especially when OC'ing. The problem seems to be more prevalent on nForce boards, though. Therefore, I'd suggest a P35 board, like the Asus P5K if you don't need RAID, or the P5K-E if you do. The Gigabyte P35-DS3P and the Abit IP35 Pro are also very good alternatives.

Thanks for the heads up on the memory power issue and the EPP memory BS. I found the v 2.0 version of the GA-P35-DS3P here for $171.60 delivered. It doesn’t have the second NIC and other bells and whistles that the GA-X38-DQ6 has but then again its $125 less at the moment. My only concern with the P35 boards is that all of the 1x PCI-E slots get deactivated when a secondary (even non-sli) video card gets added. This probably won’t be a big deal especially since this would only be an interim MB if I went with it. It would be nice if more the X38s were out and some real life benchmarks and reviews were out.

DOM