OC'ing for the lowest price

TaintedSquirrel

[H]F Junkie
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Aug 5, 2013
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My current specs:

Q6600 G0 @ 9x400
GSkill 4 GB DDR2-800
Sapphire ATI HD5870
Corsair HX620

I'm going to be upgrading my CPU, RAM, and Mobo by the end of the year and I'd like to save as much cash as possible so I can get a better GPU sometime early next year. I only use my PC for gaming and general activity like web browsing, I don't encode or Fold or anything that's truly CPU intensive. I only need something to remove the CPU bottleneck from games.

In the past, I bought CPU's like the E2160 and E5200 which could overclock by 100% out of the box. These were $50 chips that performed at a $200 level when OC'd, saved me, my friends, and my family hundreds of dollars a few years ago.

So basically what I'm asking is, what's the cheapest CPU I can buy with the maximum overclockability that will benefit my games the most? I was looking into the 4670K since it's new, but $239 is a bit steep and I think it's overkill for games at the moment. I'm open to older generation CPU's, I'd even consider buying EoL stuff from eBay, if it means getting the performance I'm asking for.

Are there any "monster overclockers" from the last 2 years or so that I could grab for $100~$150 and match current-gen performance, or is the hardware so outdated I shouldn't even bother? I can't even keep up with Intel's current sockets, it looks like they've used 3 or 4 since the original i7 920 and now I don't know where to start.
 
Unfortunately Intel doesn't sell low end chips that can be overclocked these days. The best I was able to do was a 4670k and Asrock Extreme 4 for $300 at Micro Center. The overclock wasn't that high either.
 
Unfortunately Intel doesn't sell low end chips that can be overclocked these days. The best I was able to do was a 4670k and Asrock Extreme 4 for $300 at Micro Center. The overclock wasn't that high either.

The "low end" x79 stuff overclocks quite nicely.

Not close to what the OP is looking for in terms of price, but the 3820 and 4820 are the "low end" of the x79 stuff.

Op, it looks like you can snag an i7 930 off of Ebay for about $100. The 920 and 930 were/are very good overclockers.

Either one at stock will be a good amount faster than your current setup, even with your current setup at 3.6Ghz.

A decent overclocking board is still not going to be that cheap though.. you are looking at around $120-$150 or more for a good used board. gigabyte UD5 or similiar would probably be your best bet.

An ASUS board would probably be fine as well, but if you have to send in a motherboard to ASUS, don't plan on ever getting a working board again.
 
I don't know if I want to go as far back as the 920/930 since I'll most likely keep the setup for a long time, only upgrading the GPU for about 5-6 years.
I looked into some used 2500k's and the cheapest I found was around $170 despite being almost 3 years old. For that price I may as well just buy a new CPU and even the bump to the 4670k doesn't look so bad.

I've only ever used ASUS's gamer series boards ("Maximus" etc) since I've had bad results with generic boards resetting overclocks constantly. Gigabite, specifically. I'll look into ASRock since the higher-tier boards are out of my price range.
 
I don't know if I want to go as far back as the 920/930 since I'll most likely keep the setup for a long time, only upgrading the GPU for about 5-6 years.
I looked into some used 2500k's and the cheapest I found was around $170 despite being almost 3 years old. For that price I may as well just buy a new CPU and even the bump to the 4670k doesn't look so bad.

I've only ever used ASUS's gamer series boards ("Maximus" etc) since I've had bad results with generic boards resetting overclocks constantly. Gigabite, specifically. I'll look into ASRock since the higher-tier boards are out of my price range.

Just be aware that the ASROCK boards do not tend to have quite as many options in BIOS as ASUS and a few other brands.

Some of the ASROCK boards are very nice, some are just so-so. That being said, my current ASROCK board is pretty nice despite the current BIOS still being buggy for SB-E CPUs since it is more geared to IB-E CPUs.
 
Just be aware that the ASROCK boards do not tend to have quite as many options in BIOS as ASUS and a few other brands.

Some of the ASROCK boards are very nice, some are just so-so. That being said, my current ASROCK board is pretty nice despite the current BIOS still being buggy for SB-E CPUs since it is more geared to IB-E CPUs.
It's a shame people don't review or comment on bios's in detail, usually just things like "Bios is nice" which is definitely not true for Gigabyte boards, it's like they design those things for toddlers.

It looks like I'm going to be limited to Z87 for the overclocking features anyway. Since it's a chipset designed for OCing I assume all of the bios's will be capable. At this point it's just an issue of price and reliability since I don't need all the other bells and whistles. I'm going to see if I can track down a Z87 roundup mobo review somewhere, maybe get a better look at all of them.
 
My 3570k and ASUS p8z77v-pro board were purchased on release day and the auto overclock feature set the chip at 4.5ghz and it ran fine for a long time.
I ended up RMAing the CPU and the MB due to a really stupid issue (flaw) with the design that even ASUS didn't know about, but when I got them both back and ran the autoOC again it went right up to 4.8 and stayed there.
I'm running it at 4.4 now due to not needing the OC that high.

BTW, the issue was that the 'onboard' WIFI uses a miniPCIe card in a proprietary adapter that connects by the IO area, and when you are using that the topmost PCIe 1x slot is not available. When I disabled the onboard WIFI, the slot became available again. Was a contributing factor in why my house is now all wired up with GBe.
 
I don't know if I want to go as far back as the 920/930 since I'll most likely keep the setup for a long time, only upgrading the GPU for about 5-6 years.
I looked into some used 2500k's and the cheapest I found was around $170 despite being almost 3 years old. For that price I may as well just buy a new CPU and even the bump to the 4670k doesn't look so bad.

I've only ever used ASUS's gamer series boards ("Maximus" etc) since I've had bad results with generic boards resetting overclocks constantly. Gigabite, specifically. I'll look into ASRock since the higher-tier boards are out of my price range.

Check out the prices on XEON L5639 chips on Ebay.

Hex core 1366 chip for $80.
 
Check out the prices on XEON L5639 chips on Ebay.

Hex core 1366 chip for $80.

I ordered one of these from ebay with a sabertooth X58 asus board for $120. Ill let you know how it goes when it gets here :) I really dont think you can argue with the value. six cores for $80 then can overclock to 3.8ghz+. Guys are getting over 10 in cinebench 11.5 benchmark, my 4.9ghz FX8320 I think was in the 8's somewhere...
 
I don't know if I want to go as far back as the 920/930 since I'll most likely keep the setup for a long time, only upgrading the GPU for about 5-6 years.
I looked into some used 2500k's and the cheapest I found was around $170 despite being almost 3 years old. For that price I may as well just buy a new CPU and even the bump to the 4670k doesn't look so bad.

I've only ever used ASUS's gamer series boards ("Maximus" etc) since I've had bad results with generic boards resetting overclocks constantly. Gigabite, specifically. I'll look into ASRock since the higher-tier boards are out of my price range.

When looking at used processors keep in mind that many people will 'bin' chips by testing their overclocks and then resell the ones that don't perform well.

If you're looking for the lowest price motherboard for overclocking then Asus is pretty much off the table because their boards always cost more than their equivalent competitors. ASRock is pretty decent but I would echo their weaker BIOS support. I don't see any missing overclocking options on my Extreme 4 but they seem to have stopped updates 3 months after it was released. My previous EVGA P55 FTW had regular BIOS updates for almost 2 years(!).
 
I ordered one of these from ebay with a sabertooth X58 asus board for $120. Ill let you know how it goes when it gets here :) I really dont think you can argue with the value. six cores for $80 then can overclock to 3.8ghz+. Guys are getting over 10 in cinebench 11.5 benchmark, my 4.9ghz FX8320 I think was in the 8's somewhere...

I ordered one as well.

Current 1366 setup has been having trouble cold booting, so I ordered a used Gigabyte UD5 because I suspect my current motherboard doesn't like the W3565, plus the board doesn't really like anything over 180bclk no matter what chip is in it.
Then I saw these chips and figured I might as well since my current 1366 chip sells for more than what I got this chip for.
 
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