by congo » Fri Mar 17, 2006 1:44 am
"Any opinions on MSI stuff ? "K8N Neo4 Platinum nForce4 Ultra" , in specific ? "
I never used an MSI board, a couple of current models look ok, including the one you quoted above.
"Is there a big difference between nForce4 and nForce4-ultra ? "
No, there are subtle differences however, such as whether the chipset supports SATA II or just plain SATA. Trying to screw the cost down by penny pinching on the mainboard is a tactic best left to system builders where profits are a primary consideration. Finding a FULLY featured mainboard with good overclocking BIOS support is a massive undertaking, and you will find that there are only a handful of suitable boards out there among hundreds of pretenders. Epox, Abit, Asus, DFI and MSI are contenders. (Certain Epox boards are on my wish list at the moment)
MSI use some funky customisations on their boards with optional modules available if I remember correctly. I'm not so sure of the value of such additions, and often wonder how the chipset and performance in general will respond to such "optimisations". To read the MSI brochures, everything looks great, I'm just not one for gimmicks.
Epox have released a plethora of NF4 boards and they have subtle differences. I can't wait to get my hands on one of the better ones to try them out.
I recently built a performance rig based on a high end Abit board. It could have gone a lot smoother and the board arrived D.O.A. when shipped the first time. Fortunately, their support network here worked without a hitch and we had a functioning board back within a week. Our Abit arrived with a thermal pad under the northbridge heatpipe assembly and by way of mass production techniques, the alignment was less than adequate. We removed the thermal tape and used compound after carefully and painstakingly re-aligning the heat pipe assembly. (this involved removing the assembly from it's mounting on the mainboard and re-assembly after actually bending the parts into alignment, not a very satisfactory situation for a high end board.) The owner has reported some hiccups but all in all he is very satisfied. 90 FPS in FS9 will do that.
Asus are a great choice if you want all the features a board can offer. Some models need some cooling mods performed before installation but this is also true with a few NF4 boards. Asus Overclock support is good, but lacks features desirable for true fanatics. The BIOS in Asus boards is good enough to get 30% + overclocks on my rig.
DFI are fine but lack a gameport and other older interfaces, as do the majority of boards out there. DFI provide great BIOS support. DFI bios options are actually too complex for all but the most knowledgeable tweakers. Epox and Abit BIOS 's are the only one's that rival DFI's as far as I'm aware.
"Any favorites among 7800gt manufacturers ?"
Leadtek. There is one other that escapes me, someone else here should know.
"As for RAM.. I'm convinced I'll be fine with a 2-2-2-5 DDR400.. any brand (tell me if I'm wrong) and just punching up the CPU by 10 %.. "
So you understand, and you probably already do, but anyway..... the timings are quoted at a certain bus speed, if you increase the bus speed, the timings need to go higher or you lose stability. Hence the timings quoted are at 400mhz. As fish-n-pilot already said, OCZ offer exceptional value and support, but depending on availability and price, OCZ may not be an attractive option. I'm using Kingmax not because it's a trendy overclocking ram, but simply because it presented a viable price/performance requirement for me, where OCZ was completely out of the question at the time because of the greed of retailers taking advantage of an enthusiast market locally. (My Kingmax was reasonably cheap and my budget was stretched.) I might also add that my Kingmax does in fact perform admirably on my rig.
There is much written on the topic of using overclocking ram on NF4 systems, and many "experts" say that it is a waste of money if you think it will bring performance benefits, because the RAM is already fast enough and systems show very little real world performance benefits with fast and expensive ram fitted. Personally, I wanted RAM I could overclock and play about with, I was happy to pay a little extra for it and I'll never look back........ it's great stuff, but I have not done real world application testing with it in a controlled environment.
"I'm going to go research this 1T stuff.. I hope my head doesn't explode."
Some NF4 boards are unstable with 1T command rate PERIOD. Asus boards seem to fall in this category, I don't know why this is and can only surmise it's how the chipset has been implemented. My system has been tested using 1T and 2T. My best performance has always been achieved with 2T and high clock speeds. 1T will usually (if not always) cause instability at high clock speeds on most boards as far as I've researched.
The "experts" out there say 1T at lower clocks is better than 2T at high clockspeeds, I would take this with a grain of salt until tested by yourself on your own rig.
Mainboard: Asus P5K-Premium, CPU=Intel E6850 @ x8x450fsb 3.6ghz, RAM: 4gb PC8500 Team Dark, Video: NV8800GT, HDD: 2x1Tb Samsung F3 RAID-0 + 1Tb F3, PSU: Antec 550 Basiq, OS: Win7x64, Display: 24&
