What makes a classic overclocking motherboard?
Posted on 17th Jun 2009 at 08:29 by Mark Mackay with 26 comments
It should be said that on the grand scale of everything, I’m relatively new to the world of performance hardware. Some of the guys on the team have been into PC hardware and modding since the late 1500s and a few even longer than that. I got my first PC when I was 18 (about 8 years ago now) and it took a couple of years before I became interested in modding and overclocking.
This post is all about what makes a classic overclocking motherboard, and I feel I ought to apologise at the outset to the old schoolers for not mentioning any classic Uberboards that date from before my day.
The first PC I ever built completely from scratch used an Asus P5W DH Deluxe Wi-Fi, a motherboard that won a Custom PC Approved award back in Issue 39’s (December 2006) labs test. I was keen to start learning how to overclock and wanted to get one that would allow me to satisfy my growing urge for tinkering with my CPU.
However, at the time I ordered all my kit, I didn’t have my copy of Custom PC to hand and couldn’t quite remember the suffix. I knew it was an Asus board with ‘P5’ in the title, so punched the digits into the eTailer website and searched away.
Two boards came up; the P5W DH Deluxe and the P5B Deluxe. Which one was it? I wanted to get it right, so investigated the specs a little. The P5W was based on Intel’s 975X chipset, while the P5B was based on Intel’s P965 chipset. Surely then the P5W DH with its higher end chipset was the one I wanted?
Click.
Wrong. It was the P5B that was the zomgwtf overclocker. Sure, the P5W DH was okay and it got me started and lasted for a few years. But it got me thinking - why wasn’t the board with high-end chipset the better one? Despite the fact the 975X even had an ‘X’ for eXtreme, the Asus Commando and P5B with their P965 chipsets were the boards holding world records.
A couple of years later, the Asus P5K Pro was winner of the awards, kicking PCB ass and taking names. Yet again, there were more expensive motherboards out there, but none overclocked better, so that’s the one all the cool kids ordered. It's also the board that I used to build many high-end overclocked systems when I worked for Vadim computers.
You’d think that when motherboard manufacturers released their uber high-end motherboards that it would be those that were the overclocking kings. You'd think the £260 high-end model would overclock further than the £150 budget model, but as with the two examples listed above, that just often isn’t the case.
Having talked about this to various members of the team, we're still undecided as to why this is. Is there a degree of luck involved at the design stage, arising from choosing all the myriad components that make a motherboard? Is it because there are different design teams at most motherboard companies, and some are more accomplished than others? Or is there just a touch of magic involved when it comes to separating the great from the good?
This post is all about what makes a classic overclocking motherboard, and I feel I ought to apologise at the outset to the old schoolers for not mentioning any classic Uberboards that date from before my day.
The first PC I ever built completely from scratch used an Asus P5W DH Deluxe Wi-Fi, a motherboard that won a Custom PC Approved award back in Issue 39’s (December 2006) labs test. I was keen to start learning how to overclock and wanted to get one that would allow me to satisfy my growing urge for tinkering with my CPU.
Two boards came up; the P5W DH Deluxe and the P5B Deluxe. Which one was it? I wanted to get it right, so investigated the specs a little. The P5W was based on Intel’s 975X chipset, while the P5B was based on Intel’s P965 chipset. Surely then the P5W DH with its higher end chipset was the one I wanted?
Click.
Wrong. It was the P5B that was the zomgwtf overclocker. Sure, the P5W DH was okay and it got me started and lasted for a few years. But it got me thinking - why wasn’t the board with high-end chipset the better one? Despite the fact the 975X even had an ‘X’ for eXtreme, the Asus Commando and P5B with their P965 chipsets were the boards holding world records.
You’d think that when motherboard manufacturers released their uber high-end motherboards that it would be those that were the overclocking kings. You'd think the £260 high-end model would overclock further than the £150 budget model, but as with the two examples listed above, that just often isn’t the case.
Having talked about this to various members of the team, we're still undecided as to why this is. Is there a degree of luck involved at the design stage, arising from choosing all the myriad components that make a motherboard? Is it because there are different design teams at most motherboard companies, and some are more accomplished than others? Or is there just a touch of magic involved when it comes to separating the great from the good?
26 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyI don't know, the relatively cheap Gigabyte EP45-UD3P and UD3R can overclock better than the more expensive X48s.
Also, look at the P5Q Pro, a pretty decent but low end board, that was destructive as well. Or the Mid-range P35 Asus(P5K something w/ Wi-fi) that surpassed some of it's more expensive brothers.
I still think that perhaps there is some luck in it, but there's other factors, like the CPU batch or the types of RAM...the list goes on.
But in terms of motherboards, I think it's just a luck guess or a golden sample, and that luck still exists, I mean even within that one model, some can get up to 4.6Ghz with no volt tweaks on an E8400, but simultaneously, others can't even touch the 4Ghz mark without instabilities, volt change or not.
All in all though, I find that those "overclocking" boards are a waste of money, I mean sure, it's an enthusiast thing, but is it really needed? Not really, same goes for those open OC competitions too.
http://lp.pcmoddingmy.com/albums/userpics/10003/nf4mod01.jpg
Still got mine running strong in my folks' computer.
Before that, the Abit NF7-S was another classic, I had a lot of fun with mine over the years. :)
http://www.pretaktovanie.sk/obr/prispevky/stg/3/image001.jpg
The only thing those "premium" boards seem to have is more **** that nobody will ever use.
Proof is in the testing, friend broke down his rig with a moblie 2500+ which i bought off him, before the rip down we tried a highest clock test and could only hit 2.6GHz with twin delta's doing the cooling, memory was stock speed of 200Mhz, all this running in a NF7-s.
Popped the chip out into my cheaper epox 8RDA3+ and it screamed to 3GHz, multipler set at x15, we were sure it was a record, but googling destoyed are hopes.
Either way at the time my Socket A beast could out perform AMD's new 754 chips as i had Dual channel memory over the 754 single channel failure.
True overclocking boards should be cheap and very tweakable, the uber end boards are a waste of money. Its bad enough the common average price of a 'low end' board is now £100, 5 years ago £100 was the average price of a high end board! Now graphics card have broken even the £500 mark for consumer gaming range, and motherboards seem to break the £300.
All for what, the premium we now pay on motherboards in order to squeeze some free speed, now out weighs the benefit.
We bought cheap CPU's and overclocked them because we couldn't afford the mid-range or high end version, but now the price difference between the levels of CPU's is now added to the price of the motherboards.
Overclocking has become dare i say it, to comerical, with the likes of graphics card manufactures adding overclocked versions to there product line, at a higher cost! chargering for something that is free!!!!
No love for the P5K WiFi?
And Remember the beastly Abit-P35 and the Legendary Nforce4 DFIs?
The best P45 overclocker so far to grace the public was the Gigabyte EP45-UD3R and the Asus P5Q series(the low end P45 ones).
asus did well with the intel chipset with c2d for example.. but the striker extreme using nvidias chipset turned out a bad buy.. it's probably a combo of everything- you could have probably built a mb with the very best sold state components around that chipset and have it fail against a cheap intel
Man, you get paid way too much if you think £150 is a budget model! XD
Just because I didn't mention it doesn't mean I don't like it... I've used an EP31 and it got rave reviews, but I've never seen a P5K.
Complete agree. 'Overclocking' CPUs are even worse - $1000 for an unlocked multiplier 'Extreme Edition'...
AMD's got it right though, their BE chips aren't that much from the regular ones.
Still though I agree, time is technology's worst enemy, and only chumps would've bought an Extreme Chip anyways.
BTW, isn't the world-record highest OC'ed CPU a P4 or a Celeron?
And The connect the dots were much much much fun, still though, it was needless hassle.
Anyone remember the XP 3200+? Or the late FX-62? Those were legendary chips in their own right, albeit horridly expensive.
also, did you know: Abit was the first one to implement BIOS based overclocking
No, you're not getting old - I remember them too. :) Heck, I remember flicking switches on the motherboard for overclocking as well - ah, the heady days of getting my P75 to work at the same speed as a P120. It didn't even need any extra voltage - which was good as my mobo didn't support giving it any extra juice - just a slightly larger heatsink on the chip. (Which was a pain in the arse, 'cause the heatsink was practically glued to the CPU... I did get it off, eventually, but I didn't risk it until I had a backup processor to drop in if something went horribly wrong - I slapped a little fan on the old heatsink for a few months... but preferred the passive sink.) Of course, in those days I didn't really know what Prime95 was... so it probably wasn't torture test stable... but it never crashed whether idle or gaming (P75 @ 120MHz, 24MB RAM, 4MB Voodoo 1 = Half-life goodness...) so for my needs then, it was stable.
...
As for the fastest overclock, Elton, I believe in raw MHz it is a P4, yes. In percentage terms (which I find more impressive) I'm pretty sure it's Core 2... although I might well be wrong there.
I put a Variable resistor on a PS3 fan...ran damned fast too...didn't work though because the fan was computer controlled.
And those volt mods were awesome, too bad the new boards take the professional fun and the hard work away nowadays.
Anyone remember the many attempts to prevent(or at least reduce) VDROOP?
I made one of those and got my 600 slot a athelon running at a gig (it was the batch they underclocked because they ran out of budget chips- I cracked it open at it was a 950 :])
Aye, but at the time that was my first PC I'd just overclocked... and taking a soldering iron to it wasn't even an option. ;)