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I'm looking for some suggestions...

M

mrmylanman

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 13, 2008
Messages
1,484
Hey all,

I have a feeling my motherboard is starting to be defective, and I am not terribly pleased with it anyway. (overclocking results, it takes a lot of voltage to get it stable at 3.8, features, the BIOS sucks, slow booting, etc...)

So, I think what I may do, if I can't resolve the issues of getting SLI to work on my board (suddenly it stopped working), I may just bite the bullet and get a micro ATX motherboard and go back to "semi-SFF". By that I mean I don't care too much about size, but my mid ATX just seems huge. I want to fix that because it's a bit much and I don't need 7 hard drives, for example (1 or 2 is fine).

I was also looking for motherboard suggestions. As I see it now there are 3 micro ATX i7 motherboards (I hope to reuse all my stuff except the motherboard by the way), the DFI Lan Party, the ASUS Gene, and the MSI. Has anyone on here had an exceptional experience with either? Also I have a Coolermaster V8 I would LIKE to reuse, however I know that would be asking a bit much, in which case I'm open to other cooler suggestions.

I already used the SG03, it had cooling problems, I have an SG01, however it's not the F version, and that would be a problem with the 2 GTX260s I want to use.

Thanks a ton. I have a TV tuner but I will be getting rid of that anyway and getting one that is more Linux-friendly (maybe a USB or Firewire one).

I would like the option in the future to water cool open to me, although I may never end up doing that.

A few cases that I like are the Lian Li PC-V351 and the Antec Mini P180, if that helps with suggestions.

Thanks

Mylan
 
I have all three of the X58 boards. They are all pretty good.

The MSI and the Asus have mounting holes to accept socket775 mount HSFs. The DFI doesn't.

I can't comment on your possible case selections.

The Asus board is about $70 more expensive than the MSI for the same feature set.
 
How about overclocking? I have read where people had good luck with the Asus in that regard, but have not heard a whole lot about the MSI yet, although I hear it makes the Asus northbridge seem cold.

Any thoughts on this?
 
mrmylanman said:
How about overclocking? I have read where people had good luck with the Asus in that regard, but have not heard a whole lot about the MSI yet, although I hear it makes the Asus northbridge seem cold.

Any thoughts on this?
Click to expand...

All three boards are loaded with bios options.

DFI has better board cooling by a mile.

The Asus and MSI could fry an egg.
 
It looks like the DFI may be my pick then. I did hear that memory overclocking was an issue with the DFI. Is that true?
 
mrmylanman said:
It looks like the DFI may be my pick then. I did hear that memory overclocking was an issue with the DFI. Is that true?
Click to expand...

Overclocking the memory is overrated for i7 in my experience.

I actually run 12GB but I underclock slightly. 6GB of DDR3 at DDR31600 is plenty fast enough.

If you want a deal on a slightly used DFI board and chip I would do a search in FS/FT. ;)
 
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