[StormX2]

so Ive been out of the game for a while, so I am hoping to get some brotherly love here.

Ive been using my Wifes PC at home in the Basement for when I need to do extra work, unfortunately the PC is a bit old, it does hold its own, but its becoming less stable, and there seems to be this Bending of the GPU socket which forces the PC to restart sometimes, and other times to never boot up.

Basically it is becoming too much of a hassle for me to fix every day and I am obviously worries about it biting the dust and dieing.

I do use the PC for Work purposes, and Gaming when time permits it, usually if the kids are in bed.

She currently has the following setup,

Q9300 Stock w/ Zalman CNPS9500 (I believe thats the one, looks right)
8GB G.Skill DDR2 800 (4x2GB)
MSI P7N Platinum SLI
2x XFX 9800 GT with some Zalman Copper cooler of some form, not running SLI any more cus of the unstableness
ABS Tagan BZ Series 900W modular (she got it cus its got lights...)

all in a pretty cramped Apevia X-Jupiter Jr G-Type

Now the easy option would be to find a 775 motherboard, but I get the feeling that people will be selling these for less than a fair price so Im not so sure it is worth it. Plus the q9300 processor and Ram do not like to overclock at all, but I am going to blame that on the MSI motherboard.

I dont have a whole lot of money so i need to do this as cheaply as possible. But I am an OCN'er and I refuse to have lame equipment!

so help me out guys, maybe I could get away with a 1155 mobo and processor easily enough?

Maybe someone knows of a good deal on a great 775 mobo?

Reps to all those who take the time.

 

[WR6133]

If budget is extremely low I'd post a wanted thread for a 775 board here you wont get cheaper for that rig than simply replacing the board. If that fails and you go new I would go AM3+ you can get a board for peanuts, phenom II's sell for pocket money and the price you sell that DDR2 for will likely cover the new DDR3

 

[StormX2]

Any ideas on a good 775 mobo to grab?

I skipped 775 personally, I dont remember a whole heck of alot of it other than the foxconn p55 bloodrage that the kids were raping E2180's with lol

 

[DeXel]

If you want to keep that SLI, you need nforce board. They generally don't OC well. Check for EVGA or XFX nforce 780i or 790i. EVGA also has slightly improved FTW versions

 

[StormX2]

im almost tempted to look into used 1366 builds. they should be going pretty cheaply..

Well i dont know much about 780i and 790i

also it is possible that if I ever receive the Freebie GPU I won, which is a GTX 295, I could put the GTX 275 in the wifes PC and not worry about SLI. But ive not heard from the Freebie guy in over a week

if 780i and 790i are not good motherboards than I would rather not get them lol,

 

[Mikecdm]

Quote:

Originally Posted by StormX2

Any ideas on a good 775 mobo to grab?

I skipped 775 personally, I dont remember a whole heck of alot of it other than the foxconn p55 bloodrage that the kids were raping E2180's with lol

You just mixed up three generations of intel boards

. The bloodrage was an x58 board, p55 is an entire different chipset and E2180's where 775.

Lately its difficult to find a good 775 board for cheap. I consider $50 a fair price but most good or decent boards exceed that. The gigabyte ep45-ud3p or ud3r are always recommended and good overclocking boards. Unfortunately, they've been selling for more than what I would like to pay. A lot of them time they are about $80-100 or more. Some of the higher end P5Q boards are pretty good as are any maximus or rampage boards. It really just comes down to availability and thats a bit slim at the moment.

 

[StormX2]

bloodrage was 1366?? well shoot I coulda swore it was a P55

just goes to show you how much I skipped lol

 

[WR6133]

Quote:

Originally Posted by StormX2

Any ideas on a good 775 mobo to grab?

I skipped 775 personally, I dont remember a whole heck of alot of it other than the foxconn p55 bloodrage that the kids were raping E2180's with lol

skipped 775 too I was humping heavy [email protected] around 3rd world hell holes so didnt have much time for rigs

 

[BorisTheSpider]

IME, the DDR2 will sell for the good money, and the CPU probably will as well. I'd just go low-end 1155. I recently build someone a nice little build that I was very impressed with. Gigabyte Z77-D3H mobo (no SLI possible, the Z77X-D3H does do SLI/Crossfire), i3-2100 and an AMD 6670 GDDR5 version, but you'd probably want to stick with your existing GPUs. Really an impressively fast system for the money - an SSD is a must IMO though, so I'd definitely budget for that. Honestly, for ordinary desktop work, I would be unable to tell that system from my own if I was blind tested on simple stuff like browsing, opening apps etc, it was really impressive for the money.

Total cost was about £500 for the whole thing including case and PSU, but I did get a second hand PSU and CPU for it. The case, I was particularly impressed with as a budget gem - a Xigmatek Asgard pro, a bit budget when you really looked (ie. stuff like no replaceable PCI blanks, not many thumbscrews) but once it's put together, really nice for very little money indeed. Same goes for the cooler (a hyper 212 evo) which does a cracking job on the cheap.

The i3 can't overclock though, and there is no i3 with an unlocked multiplier. If you must overclock, you end up at either 2500k or 3570k as the cheapest options - intel have made sure to get people buying near-top-of-the-range stuff to OC it since 1155 came out and they introduced the K-series chips. OTOH, you could get an i3-2100 or similar now, then swap the chip out later if money is really tight. The other options aren't really worth considering - the ivy and sandy quads that are locked cost basically as much as the unlocked ones, so there is no point - you either spend 2500k/3570k money, or you move down to the i3 line.

I wouldn't buy second hand 775 now, because as you said, it holds a premium. That should work in your favour though, because you should be able to sell your parts for reasonable money to people keeping old systems going - I still have 775 in my fileserver for example, and if the mobo blew up tomorrow, I'd probably look for a second hand 775 replacement simply because rebuilding the whole thing on a new platform is a hassle, and the box is more than fast enough for what it does.

You'll honestly be suprised just how much you get for your money with the Z77-D3H, the only fly in the ointment is that it only does x16 then some x1 slots (which are physically x16). If you only put two cards in, I think you can do x16/x4, so if you need to keep both GPUs for multiple monitors, you will be OK for desktop work on the second GPU at x4, but you'll then lose _all_ the other slots - they will turn off. I expect, if you need another card, you could do x1 to the second GPU, but I wonder if that would be sufficient even for desktop work, it probably would but I am unsure.

 

[BorisTheSpider]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mikecdm

Some of the higher end P5Q boards are pretty good as are any maximus or rampage boards. It really just comes down to availability and thats a bit slim at the moment.

LOL, yeah, I'm rocking a P5Q Premium in my fileserver. I'm keeping it as one keeps a painting, or a 20 year old bottle of wine - for antique value. Still pretty fast for what I'm doing with it too.

 

[StormX2]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BorisTheSpider

LOL, yeah, I'm rocking a P5Q Premium in my fileserver. I'm keeping it as one keeps a painting, or a 20 year old bottle of wine - for antique value. Still pretty fast for what I'm doing with it too.

that's what I actually plan on doing with my old Opteron 165's DFI Lanparty UT SLI-DR,frame the Mobo and have UV lights in each side of the frame.
One day I need to talk my dad into givin me back the old beast

im at odds as to Sell or not to Sell the CPU / Ram though. Ive been saving up parts, freebies, about to be thrown out stuffs for my Sons first PC build. Hes always known how to operate a PC, install his games when he was very little , helped us build the PC's.

So we have a terrible ECS 774, a 2GB stick of Kingston HyperX (cant recall the speed) an e6300 or 6200 i forget now, and we have drives he can use.

my wifes q9300 would go to him, My GTX 295 would go to my Work/Wifes PC for the time being, 9800 GT would go to my Son, and I would benchmark (hopefully) with a GTX 295 + 9800 GT Physx card

so if i don't sell all teh ram, I can put that in my sons board, but I don't remember if it is 2 slots or 4 slots

otherwise yes selling her rig would be very worthwhile to consider...

Sooo.. I am getting confused with this whole thing about cant Overclock without the Unlocked Multi.. What happened to FSB x Multi = Overclock

 

[BorisTheSpider]

FSB+Multi went the way of the dodo unfortunately. A lot of the Northbridge got moved into the CPU.

PCIe no longer goes through the northbridge, it goes either via the "southbridge" (the chipset) called DMI which is slow and normally used for the "auxilliary" slots like x1 stuff and legacy PCI via pcie to pci bridges, but _most_ of the PCIe bandwidth is now direct from the CPU.

The same goes for the memory controller, that was also moved from the northbridge and now it's on die as part of the CPU.

So, what was FSB is now BCLK (base clock) which clocks pretty much everything - the PCIe lanes, the CPU->Chipset interconnect, the memory controller. It's set at 100MHz, and although you might get it to 101 or 102MHz generally no-one touches it, because as soon as you make that unstable, everything is unstable - overclocking BCLK is reputed to lead to drive corruption etc. In any case, as I said, you'd never get a noticable overclock out of it, it just won't go much past 100MHz and remain stable.

So, the only way to overclock is by raising the multiplier, and the multiplier is fixed unless it's a K series CPU, but they only make K series in the quads, so no overclocking at the budget end of the range any more.