Best mATX board for Core 2 Duo?

LawGiver

2[H]4U
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Oct 16, 2005
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Im an AMD guy, dont know nothing about Intel. Wanna buy E6300 and oc to around 2.5Ghz.
 
I want i want i want, but you cant have.

The best right now is the p5b-vm, which is less than stellar.
 
Yep, see the other 5 threads asking for mATX C2D goodness. Just not out there yet.
 
Dillusion said:
The best right now is the p5b-vm, which is less than stellar.
Settle for 2.1GHz? No? For value, AM2 or 939 is still the best for mATX setups, until there are some decent boards.
 
Seems like everybody has been hinting at something, but I swear I hear crickets on this board nowadays! I went through this with 754, 939 and now 775. I thought mATX was catching on... maybe it's that intel is the problem. Looks like OCing + mATX + AMD has progressed, but OCing + mATX + intel is just getting rolling.

I'll bet we won't see many new releases until the new year... Maybe I am wrong, but I would think 4th quarter would be when they focus on just getting things done and not new releases.
 
939 has some good boards and AM2 has the nView from abit which is really nice.
 
There are none and there probably will never be any good oc mATX mobo for conroe. That Asus mobo is not user friendly and only support 1.9v memory. I think mATX users can give up about getting a good conroe setup.

There are not even plans for manufacturers to even make one. So my best guess is don't expect to see any new mATX mobo. The G965 chipset blows and that is the only one out so far. There is 945 but that does not support all DDR2 memory.

Mostlikely, there will be zero enthusiast mATX for conroe.

I think mATX ppl who want to upgrade should jump on the am2 bandwagon. There seem to be a tone of excellent enthisiast mATX out. I will go am2 when the g80 is out. I have given up hopes for a good conroe board
 
AM2 is rockin' on mATX platform. I dont know why everyone is so balls out for conroe. Its like an extra 5-8% in games and shit, its not like AM2 cant run anything. My 3800 at 2.7 with the ram over 1000mhz is pretty fast.
 
I may go with the P5B-VM but I'm undecided. I'm not an OCer so that does not matter
to me at all. I don't want to deal with pickey RAM issue voltages.

Also looking at either a SG01 or TJ08 cases but the total cost for this is about the same
without pickey RAM as.....
the ATX Gigabyte DS3 MB (smaller then standard ATX size) in a Lian Li V600S case. Small but still ATX.

What I want is a nice media/gaming machine with lots of power and vista ready.
 
Thats a bummer about the abit board and memory voltage, but at least it has two usable PCI slots vs. the Asus. Asus decided in their wisdom to move the PCI-e 1x slot to the outer edge instead of next to the PCI-E 16x slot. So, when you have a 7xxx GTX card that has a big heatsink on it, the first PCI slot is blocked. Abit's motherboard layout looks to be a bit more friendly for those with large video cards.

-E
 
Check this page... According to this guy, the Gigabyte GA-965GM-S2 does have overclocking features. He does seem to say that there are OC options in the BIOS. If this board does OC, then it looks like this might be a huge contender.

Does anyone on these boards actually have one? Everyone looked at the S2 and the manual and said it can't overclock, but until someone has one, we really can't be sure.
 
Dayvon said:
Check this page... According to this guy, the Gigabyte GA-965GM-S2 does have overclocking features. He does seem to say that there are OC options in the BIOS. If this board does OC, then it looks like this might be a huge contender.

Does anyone on these boards actually have one? Everyone looked at the S2 and the manual and said it can't overclock, but until someone has one, we really can't be sure.
Okay, prove it then. ;)

"This board is fully oc"
Pros: This board is fully oc I’m not shore why people saying this board is not oc, you better get in BIOS and take look and you will find what do you need for oc.I got this board with E6600 2GB of RAM and OC to 3.1Ghz easy

Cons: Nothing

Other Thoughts: Lot of people likes to be involved in something their are not familiar and they trying to blame on bad hardware or poor design or any kind of excuse. Prior any build try to understand function of some specific hardware do not jump right a way with bad rewievs
Very defensive. Sounds like someone from Gigabyte.
 
It doesn't matter what OC features a current generation 965G based motherboard has, odds are it won't OC for crap. You may get up to a 310-320 FSB if you're lucky, but much above that and you'll probably start to have stability issues due to 965G limitations.
 
I went ahead and ordered one of the Gigabyte boards from the Egg. I'll post back when I get this thing running. Hardest part is waiting for the freaking parts to arrive. Here in the Middle East shipping can take forever. From my order yesterday I guess it will be 3 weeks or more until I have this system up and running. *Sigh*
 
Aegeas said:
I went ahead and ordered one of the Gigabyte boards from the Egg. I'll post back when I get this thing running. Hardest part is waiting for the freaking parts to arrive. Here in the Middle East shipping can take forever. From my order yesterday I guess it will be 3 weeks or more until I have this system up and running. *Sigh*
:( I'm waiting on a review for this too. I just bit on the ultra minifly or whatever it's called and it's being shipping today. I'm pretty gunho on getting a 6400 up to 3.2ghz and am probably willing to ebay off cpu's until i hit one that can (assuming that's my limiting factor). I've never had a decently overclocked system and figure this should be it. It was the case that triggered me, and now I find that there's no p965 :( AGH
 
ziddey said:
:( I'm waiting on a review for this too. I just bit on the ultra minifly or whatever it's called and it's being shipping today. I'm pretty gunho on getting a 6400 up to 3.2ghz and am probably willing to ebay off cpu's until i hit one that can (assuming that's my limiting factor). I've never had a decently overclocked system and figure this should be it. It was the case that triggered me, and now I find that there's no p965 :( AGH

I'm waiting as well.
 
Sorry about the lack of posting about this board. Still no processor or RAM yet. Maybe someday I'll actually receive them and I can let you know something.
 
At this point are there even any rumors on any hot-rod mATX boards coming out? P965? 680i?
 
Aegeas said:
Sorry about the lack of posting about this board. Still no processor or RAM yet. Maybe someday I'll actually receive them and I can let you know something.
oh sorry, i didn't mean that i was tired of waiting on you. i just meant that i figured out in general that all these g965 boards are similar and can't break 300fsb
 
looks like one of the asus 945g matx boards can get to 350fsb with some tooling. guess i'm picking it up to use for a while. who knows how my ebay e6400 "nib" will do. if it's an A-core, maybe i'll end up selling it after i get a decent board and find out it doesn't go that much higher
 
So I bought the Gigabyte S(uck)2 and can confirm that it was a Gigabyte mole that posted that bogus review on Newegg. There are no OC options in the bios, Easytune does not work and setFSB does not work.

Reason I bothered to check it out is because there was some discussion on XS that all of the OC options were in the bios! All it would take would for them to be activated with MODBIN6. However, no one had bought the board to confirm if it would work. So I bought the board, received/installed it last night, tried to edit the bios, but found out the hard way that the 1MB bios files that Gigabyte now uses are too big to be saved correctly by MODBIN! What is worse is that Newegg has a nonrefundable on this POS board! Noooooooo… Why didn’t I buy it from Mwave like all of my other boards? Argh.

Screw Gigabyte and their doubly priced crap lumps and Newegg for their fading support.

Edit: Newegg rocks again! Check this e-mail out:

We do apologize for the inconvenience. At this time, we have set you up with an RMA for a Refund. Your RMA number is 23054720, and you will be receiving an additional email with all the return instructions.

Normally, we would have to apply a 15% restocking fee on this refund. However, we do see that you have been shopping with us for several years now, and we genuinely appreciate your staying with us. As such, we have waived the fee for you, and truly hope that we can continue working together in the future as well.

On the positive side, I can now close the other side of my case! Woot!

I am off to hassle Newegg about the return on this and see if Gigabyte will unlock those OC options. :)
 
Here is further confirmation that there are no overclocking options in this board. Thanks Gigabyte. I guess it doesn't matter since I don't do it, but I thought I would let you know.
 
its a via chipset board but...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813127017
according to the like 2 posts Ive seen about it one on newegg and another on a generic site...its a very easy board to clock a 6300 to 3.4ghz or so!
too bad its single channel memory and SATA 1.5 =( but its both DDR and DDR2 support. Interesting board to say the least....wish features were up to date though =( but one guy reported being able to do 490mhz on the FSB.
 
Gigabyte has released a new BIOS for the GA-965GM-S2 and it finally does add O/C options! I have the board and they are visible when you hit CTRL-F1 with version F3 BIOS.

I have not tried to O/C yet but it is now there, as these were not available with version F2.
 
Gigabyte has released a new BIOS for the GA-965GM-S2 and it finally does add O/C options! I have the board and they are visible when you hit CTRL-F1 with version F3 BIOS.

I have not tried to O/C yet but it is now there, as these were not available with version F2.
What options does it have? Willing to play around with it for us and give a little report as to how decent it does?
 
Here is a screenshot of the BIOS and a screenshot of me running 300FSB on a E6400. I didn't try much else... It does not have a voltage setting for either CPU or MEM. I could have sworn that in F2 there were voltages for the memory.


PIC003.jpg

image1.jpg
image2.jpg
 
Gigabyte has released a new BIOS for the GA-965GM-S2 and it finally does add O/C options! I have the board and they are visible when you hit CTRL-F1 with version F3 BIOS.

I have not tried to O/C yet but it is now there, as these were not available with version F2.
Bastards! Oh well, it doesn't look like I am missing out on anything. I think we can forget about decent C2D boards and let the e4300/e4400 chips be our salvation.
 
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