Core 2 motherboard overclocking roundup

Craig Simms overclocks 14 Core 2 motherboards. The results of his insane but spectacular testing can be found here.

The Core 2 market has had a while to stabilise and so Atomic figured it was high time to pull out our motherboard testing fingers and round up those boards on the market that had gained themselves a reputation.

While we performed the usual battery of tests, it was very clear that all these boards were just going to return the same performance values with our X6800, OCZ Flex XLC PC2-9200 RAM and 8800GTX – at least within an insignificant margin of error. If ran at stock, 3DMark06 SM3.0 would inevitably throw back around 3500 points, Sandra Memory Bandwidth tests around 5700MB/s and SuperPi came in at around 1 minute 41 seconds. In light of this, we instead decided to focus heavily on how far we could push the FSB of each board, and which would give us a sense of how overclockable each model was, and consequently give us some kind of comparison.

Four chipsets were included in the roundup – NVIDIA’s 680i and 650i, and Intel’s 975X and P965. While we would have loved to have included DFI’s ICFX3200T2R/G and hence given AMD/ATI’s final Intel chipset a run, it just wasn’t ready in time. Plus, while the 945s will handle Core 2, these should be considered as very much entry level, and hence not suitable to the round up.

Flexing our overclocking muscles, we delved into the labs to see if we could crown a clock king.



How we tested
Some of these boards broke the coveted 500MHz FSB mark, but they certainly weren’t stable at that level. In fact, you’ll see numbers here that may be lower than other reviews, simply because most reviewers push the board as fast as it can go without regards for stability. As long as they can boot CPU-Z and grab a screenshot for street cred, they’re happy, but the machine ends up being unusable – impressive but ultimately quite futile.

For us, stable means four completed tests using the Stress Prime 2004 Orthos Edition ‘blend’ test, to strain both memory and CPU simultaneously.

Following the logic that most people will buy lower-end CPUs to overclock them, we set our X6800’s multiplier to 6x while overclocking, allowing us to ramp the FSB as high as possible.

We tried to keep the RAM at a 1:1 ratio and the voltages at a stock level for as long as possible, but ultimately an ‘anything goes’ policy was adopted to see how far we could push the systems without causing damage or causing instability.

Interestingly, not a single board in the roundup featured active cooling – heatpipes and passive sinks are now part of the norm as the public has come to expect power and silence in our computing. About time!

On the flip side, while these are generally quite good solutions if you intend to massively overclock it may be worth investing a little bit of cash in some custom northbridge cooling – although this will admittedly require some creativity on the heatpiped boards.

If you’re going to buy a board and run it at stock levels, then obviously anything featured here is fine, assuming the feature-set meets your needs. SLI enthusiasts will need a 680i/650i, CrossFire should probably go 975 (965 is slightly hobbled in this regard due to a reduced number of lanes fed to the second slot) and those looking for better memory management should hit the 965. On with the tests!