C2D + Gigabyte?

[Jake_Barnes]

Has anybody built a C2D PC using either of these two mainboards:

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=322341&prodlist=pricegrabber

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813128012&ATT=13-128-012&CMP=OTC-pr1c3grabb3r

I'm thinking of building with the e6600 and would appreciate any experiences or advice? Thanks.

Jake

 

[MAK-Daddy32]

I'm running an E6400 on the DS3 and am very pleased with it. The drawbacks compared to the DQ6 include:

1) No firewire port on the board - not a big deal unless you need it, even if you do, you can buy a firewire card for less than the difference in the price of the board.

2) Number of regulators - Haven't heard of any problems with the DS3 even in highly overclocked situations

3) Better chipset cooling - only an issue if you going to overclock a lot.

4) Southbridge - only the add on controller of the DS3 supports RAID - only matters if you want to run a raid array with more than 2 drives - I don't

I'm sure others can offer additional information, but either board is nice, I chose not to pay for the extras and like I said, I'm very happy with the DS3.

Guess it really depends on what you're going to use it for and what you need it to provide.

 

[Doughbuy]

Anyways, DQ6 and DS3 are both pretty nice boards, but it also depends on if you're looking for maximum OC'ing or what...

The Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 is one of the more value priced offerings in our mid-range lineup with a street price around $145. Unlike the other boards in our roundup it does not use the Intel ICH8R which means two additional SATA ports and RAID capabilities come from the JMicron JMB363 chipset that also serves as the IDE controller. The DS3 also does not come with Firewire capability which is a mistake in our opinion.

No Intel raid on the DS3... don't know if it matters, but it seperates it from some of the other 965 boards out there.

We were able to reach a final setting of 7x455FSB resulting in a clock speed of 3185MHz. This board is fully capable of 500FSB rates with the correct memory installed. We still have an issue with the D9 Micron based 1GB modules not wanting to go above the 460FSB range in a stable manner. This issue will be fixed in an upcoming BIOS release and we will retest at that time. We did not have any issues reaching 510FSB with a set of D9 based 512MB modules in testing.

And the OC'ing here is mediocre... with some memory issues... all from this article:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2860

DQ6... I think is a bit overpriced for what it does, and it's OC'ing is above average, but nothing really spectacular either. Tom's did an article about it a while back and found it wanting.

My recommendation, if at all possible, try to find a P5B-E with the revision 1.02G...

We were able to reach a final setting of 7x490FSB with our 1.01G board with a clock speed of 3430MHz. In previous testing with different memory this board reached 7x515MHz. Our FSB results were limited by the maximum memory voltage setting at 2.1V. Our memory voltages were set higher than normal for our CPU but this is due to the Vdroop on both boards being around .03~.05V during testing.

Our 1.02G board faired better as we could increase our memory voltage to 2.35V in order to reach the final stable setting of 7x520FSB resulting in a clock speed of 3640MHz. Both ASUS boards provided the best memory timings during overclocking although we noticed certain latency settings like tRFC were very relaxed when compared to other boardsAs forum master, I'd expect you to be able to dig through the hundreds of posts over that combo since it's pretty standard =P...

Hope this helps.

Edit: I want to add, you might look into the S3 if budget is a factor. Same board with differen't caps... but performance is about the same either way.

 

[sruane]

I have an E6600 on a GA-965P-DQ6 and it is very very nice.

 

[MAK-Daddy32]

I've never put a great deal of stock in reviews about overclocking... More often than not it seems to be the luck of the draw with the individual components. Sure there are some models that almost always do well or do poorly but when a site takes a single sample of a product and "tests" its overclocking ability I tend to take it with a grain of salt.

I've seen lots of posts with people claiming some pretty amazing overclocks on the DS3.

That said, there is an issue with some types of ram not wanting to OC well on the DS3, but, this is supposedly being fixed with the next BIOS release.

 

[Jake_Barnes]

What RAM are you running? Link, if you can find one. What case is that? - I'm starting from scratch.

 

[MAK-Daddy32]

That looks like a Lian Li case - I'm got my DS3 and E6400 in a LIAN LI PC-7B plus II. You have excellent taste. :lol:

 

[Doughbuy]

Scratch eh... why not the Antec nine-hundred... couple that with a Scythe Infinity/Ninja or Tuniq Tower and you have hurricane force winds inside your comp

About OC'ing, yeah, a lot depends on individual components, and there have been nice OC's with the DS3. Thats why I usually look at around 5 or so reviews before I actually decide, so no one site which gives it a bad rating will mess it up for the rest of them.

Here, google is your friend.

 

[sruane]

What RAM are you running? Link, if you can find one. What case is that? - I'm starting from scratch.

I'm running 2GB OCZ DDR2-800 (5-5-5-15)

And thats a Lian Li case

And, while we're at it:

ATi X1900XTX (Acellero X2 cooler)
Creative X-Fi Extreme Music (Its not in the picture - added later)
Ultra 600W PS
2x 74GB WD Raptor in RAID 0
DVD RW
Floppy/Card reader
and that Zallman cooler.

I've over clocked the E6600 to 3.2GHz by lowering the memory multiplier to 8 and raising the FSB to 400. That way I can run the RAM 1:1

 

[Doughbuy]

Ewwww... I'm not crazy about the Ultra PSU, but nice parts everywhere else.

 

[kcconlin9319]

I'm very happy with my 2nd DQ6 (first one had a problem with the PCIe x16 slot and had to be RMAed). Not particularly impressed with Gigabyte utilities or documentation though. Still having problems with the JMicron IDE controller --- my Samsung IDE DVD burner seems to work fine, but the event log fills up with controller errors at the rate of one every 7 seconds when my kids play Zoo Tycoon 2. You'll have trouble mounting some CPU coolers because of the (fortunately removable) heatsink on the bottom of the mobo. RAM is 2GB Corsair XMS2-6400C4.

 

[sruane]

... You'll have trouble mounting some CPU coolers because of the (fortunately removable) heatsink on the bottom of the mobo. .....

Yeah. I took my "Crazy Cool" off so I could mount the CPU cooler.

 

[rushfan]

I've never put a great deal of stock in reviews about overclocking... More often than not it seems to be the luck of the draw with the individual components. Sure there are some models that almost always do well or do poorly but when a site takes a single sample of a product and "tests" its overclocking ability I tend to take it with a grain of salt.

I've seen lots of posts with people claiming some pretty amazing overclocks on the DS3.

That said, there is an issue with some types of ram not wanting to OC well on the DS3, but, this is supposedly being fixed with the next BIOS release.

I managed an effortless 60% overclock of my E6400 with the DS3. I have nothing but praise for this board.

 

[dean7]

... You'll have trouble mounting some CPU coolers because of the (fortunately removable) heatsink on the bottom of the mobo. .....

Yeah. I took my "Crazy Cool" off so I could mount the CPU cooler.
Speaking of the cooler... what temps does it keep your OC'd CPU at? Is that the 9500 or 9700? (looks like 9500 if I'm not mistaken)

 

[sruane]

... You'll have trouble mounting some CPU coolers because of the (fortunately removable) heatsink on the bottom of the mobo. .....

Yeah. I took my "Crazy Cool" off so I could mount the CPU cooler.
Speaking of the cooler... what temps does it keep your OC'd CPU at? Is that the 9500 or 9700? (looks like 9500 if I'm not mistaken)

Right now, as I'm writing this, I'm at 38C.

Its the PWM one - I don't recall the exact model but its the only PWM fan Zallman makes.