Confusion in the Land of 775

[deek]

I'm looking to make a cheapish upgrade to my 775 system, moving away from my old GA-P35-DS3R board that fails at quad overclocking.

I'm currently looking at two options:

DFI LANPARTY UT X48-T2R at Newegg.ca for $134.99

OR

GA-EP45-UD3P/R for somewhere in the neighborhood of $120 CDN, easy to find.

I'm really struggling with the decision. The X48 offers benefits, but isn't as good an OC'er. The P45 platform is ol' reliable, but can't handle dual x16 PCI for Crossfire (which I intend to pursue, though mid-range DX11 cards might be fine on PCI 2.0 x8). I'm also worried over the S3 sleep issue the UD3 mobos apparently suffer from.

Any suggestions?

 

[deek]

100mhz isn't gonna rock my world either way. The bottom line for me is gaming. I'm interested in OC'ing the Q9550 just enough so as not to bottleneck a dual GPU DX11 card w/ dedicated PhysX. Making 500fsb+ on a P45 would be nice for a larf, but it certainly isn't necessary for my end game. I want max lanes for a big fat GPU and enough CPU overhead to guarantee no loss of performance. Anything beyond that is just gravy.

Two things holding me back from the DFI:

1. Complexity. Did you have to get medieval on the BIOS to make 3.5GHz? Did you have to tweak settings a moderate overclocker wouldn't know the meaning of? I realize DFI boards are for serious tweak-freaks, and it's a little intimidating. I'm not afraid to hit the forums and do my research, but how crazy IS the BIOS?

2. Support. There hasn't been a BIOS update since 2008. Should I consider the board unsupported? Or did DFI simply do such a great job on the most recent BIOS that they haven't required an update in well over a year ...?

I hear a lot of ppl saying the 420fsb is where it starts to get rocky with this board and 45nm quads, and for some that ain't near sexy enough. Me, I'm not XTREME. I'm happy with a modest OC and modest temps.

 

[LoneWolf_53]

100mhz isn't gonna rock my world either way. The bottom line for me is gaming. I'm interested in OC'ing the Q9550 just enough so as not to bottleneck a dual GPU DX11 card w/ dedicated PhysX. Making 500fsb+ on a P45 would be nice for a larf, but it certainly isn't necessary for my end game. I want max lanes for a big fat GPU and enough CPU overhead to guarantee no loss of performance. Anything beyond that is just gravy.

Two things holding me back from the DFI:

1. Complexity. Did you have to get medieval on the BIOS to make 3.5GHz? Did you have to tweak settings a moderate overclocker wouldn't know the meaning of? I realize DFI boards are for serious tweak-freaks, and it's a little intimidating. I'm not afraid to hit the forums and do my research, but how crazy IS the BIOS?

2. Support. There hasn't been a BIOS update since 2008. Should I consider the board unsupported? Or did DFI simply do such a great job on the most recent BIOS that they haven't required an update in well over a year ...?

I hear a lot of ppl saying the 420fsb is where it starts to get rocky with this board and 45nm quads, and for some that ain't near sexy enough. Me, I'm not XTREME. I'm happy with a modest OC and modest temps.

As far as the BIOS goes let's just say I'm not anywhere near even intermediate skill level when it comes to OC'ing yet I pulled it off. You're right though there are a lot of settings in there and I found it best to leave some of them alone. :lol:

I installed the latest Beta Bios and have had no issues at all. FWIW I'm running Win7 64bit.

For my X58 boards there's actually quite a bit of good OC'ing info posted at the DFI site but for this particular X48 model not so much and most of the info I did find was based on Core 2 Duo setups rather than quads.

I noted some of the stuff and took cues from some of the quad settings and finally got stable.

I'd be inclined to agree that there seems to be some kind of a wall hit at around 420fsb because I couldn't get it to run there for more than a couple of minutes and then it froze.

In my case 412 just worked out to be the point where everything is happy and stress testing passed.

That's not to say that someone with a higher skill level couldn't tweak my memory and get more out of it but I'm happy with my temps and the 3.5Ghz anyway especially since I got there myself.

I did note that even one of the DFI mods indicated that X48 could be tricky to OC a quad on.

That's about as honest as I can be.




ETA: I just thought that for what it's worth I'd throw in there that if I could have I would have preferred to get another LP DK P45-T2RS Plus board but they weren't available to me anymore so that's how I ended up with this one.

Stuff happens and for reasons I won't go into I no longer had the receipt for the previous board as it was still under warranty but the USB controller went out on me for some reason or other and I couldn't get an RMA without the receipt which is my own fault.

I have several of those P45 boards and they were a bit less money and I found them easy to OC as well which is why I'm assuming that they are no longer in stock. 😀

 

[deek]

Well, having all those additional settings is nice. At least the options are there should you one day decide to push as hard as you can. Even without getting too in depth, I might be able to wring that extra 100, 200mhz out of the platform with my E0 stepping. For my purposes and comfort level, 3.4-3.6Ghz is perfectly acceptable.

I'm using Win7 64-bit as well, so that's good to know.

I wish DFI labeled their BIOS downloads more intuitively! I assume then you are using CD821, with a release date of August 21st, 2008? That's the most recent entry on the Beta BIOS site. On the "Normal" site, CDC24 (wtf?) as of December 24, 2008 appears to be the most up-to-date. Odd. Two version before that one, the update was CD829. Makes sense. Then suddenly it's CDA02 and CDC24. Way to be confusing for no real good reason, DFI!

Who knows? It might be my CPU that's gimping my OC. When it comes right down to it, I gotta consider the stock performance of each board. If I weren't to tweak a single thing, I'd rather have the DFI if only for the layout, the extra PCI-e x4 slot, the vertical SATA ports and of course the wide open x16/x16 lanes for Xfire. If overclocking to the absolute balls out ceiling were my goal, I'd already own a P45. In this case, I think the DFI is for me. It has the stock features I'm interested in, can definitely support the GPU configurations I'm considering down the road, and it's actually cheaper than the UD3P, temporarily.

I'm gonna pursue a little more last minute research before I pull the trigger, but unless I run across something that screams "PUT DOWN THE CREDIT CARD AND BACK AWAY SLOWLY", I think I've made my decision.

EDIT: The Egg also has this available, a DFI LANParty DK P45-T2RS Elite, for only $104.99. Cheapest P45 solution I've found from a reputable dealer with a layout I could use. There's also a Plus for $124.99. The Plus has two extra SATA ports and stock heatpipes. No other differences? Is 4 phase power enough for a 45nm quad overclock? Guess so. Here's a guy running an Q9550 E0 at 4.0Ghz.

 

[LoneWolf_53]

As to whether every board does it I can't say but in my case both the P45-T2RS Plus boards ran hotter than the current LP UT X-48 T2R I'm using so even though I felt the P45 was easier to OC I think I'd still go with the UT now knowing that it is cooler by quite a margin and that is measured using DFI's own Smart Guardian monitor tool that came with each respective board.

I notice The Egg does have a pretty good selection of product right now compared to a few weeks back. They didn't have the P45 Plus board when I looked but I'm glad they didn't now.

 

[ionut19]

Lots to read(i did not read all of it)..hope that i did not miss something so:
Did you try to overclock your CPU on another board/system? Sometimes a CPU just wont budge.

 

[deek]

Lots to read(i did not read all of it)..hope that i did not miss something so:
Did you try to overclock your CPU on another board/system? Sometimes a CPU just wont budge.

Nope! Unfortunately, I do not have the hardware available to test across multiple platforms. Yet another reason I'm leaning toward the X48. When all is said and done, with overclocking out of the picture (if my CPU is simply unable to OC for whatever reason), I'd rather have the stock features of the X48 board compared to the P45.

 

[deek]

Done deal. I went with the DFI X48. $134.99 for a high end X48 platform was just too tempting.

I'm prepared for a more complex and less satisfying overclock, but the board better supports the GPU configuration I will likely end up with: Nvidia's eventual DX11 dual GPU card w/ a 285 GTX for overkill dedicated PhysX. I lucked into the 285 on eBay for a song, but I'm not willing to relegate it to secondary server box duty, and if the 5970 is bottlenecked by PCI 2.0 x8 (which it appears to be, according to the numbers I've seen), whatever Nvidia drops will certainly suffer even worse (no doubt Green will be looking to retake the single card performance crown). The extra x16 slot running at x4 is perfect for my Auzentech sound card, which currently resides WAY too close to my GFX card in a poorly placed x1 and sometimes picks up interference, and the the final PCI slot will entertain my eSATA expansion board. My mini kaze 40mm fan will do a fine job on the NB. I guess my aftermarket north and south bridge heatsinks will have to stay in the plastic until I find a use for them (maybe on the old DS3R when I reintroduce and reoverclock the e6600).

Thanks to all who replied for your suggestions and input. Thanks especially to LoneWolf for detailing your personal experiences with the board and the Q9550. I've actually run across several threads of yours, things you posted while attempting to OC the combination (being stuck at 3.2GHz, etc). Do you have any tips? Are there any specific resources I should be looking at? Any links or pearls of wisdom you care to impart would be much appreciated, maybe save me some frustration. Thanks again!