TR Forums

hi, i've been around TR a couple months, and undusted my technical knowledge just in time to do my severely required desktop upgrade, since i'm running a really old pentium 4 prescott 531 1mb L2 cache...its been good so far but this year i had a temperature problem with the processor when the intel heatsink/fan had burned out and would just do 1000 rpm and the processor started hitting 105 c NO KIDDING! guess the thermal throtling kept it from dying but anyway, had it with a MSI cheapo motherboard that was enough until this year...since im reading the forums and stuff, im really interested in the pentium dual core e 5300, but i have no idea of which mobo to pair it with...guess i would like an asus or a gigabyte one, my last MSI left me with a bad taste. just want some advice as to which mobos would be a nice pair with it, and since im aiming for the 5300 im not a power user...although i would be seriously inclined to hit it with a stable 3.0 overclock, maybe more if i can get a zalman for it...just trying to stay on the safe side of things...care to give some advice to a fellow techie?

Do you want an integrated GPU or discrete? For the first option I would choose a GeForce 9300 motherboard (good integrated graphics chip, nice multimedia capabilities, can drive two digital displays). If you want a discrete GPU a P45 chipset based mobo like P5Q Pro or P5Q-E from ASUS or EP45-UD3P from Gigabyte are excellent choices. There are cheaper options as well but you haven't said anything about the price.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131296
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128358
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130214
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131348

I know you don't want MSI but it's the cheapest of the 9300 bunch and TR said it was good.

ups...i missed the price point... well since im basing this build on a e 5300 its falls on the econobox category so im looking to spend a max of 150 on the mobo, maybe a little more of its really good , thanks for the suggestions, im willing to give MSI another try if people have good experiences with the motherboard i buy, maybe i would go for the p45 chipset since i could easily upgrade to a discrete even a cheapo one

I wouldn't touch that MSI board

I would go for the Asus 9300 board, just make sure you update the BIOS before installing your OS. Seems to have had bugs in the begining but a good manufatuer like Asus will give good BIOS support.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131348

If you have a video card (PCIx16) or plan to buy one with the MB, then I would get this gigabyte board:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128359

If you get a video card are you going to play games with it or are you going general stuff with your PC?

its more like a general stuff/ heavy tinkering / medium gaming, jut if you want to know, im not looking for eye candy with this setup, just enough to be able to play it in a decent monitor at decent fps

Okay then, I would go for the GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R, $100 AR FS
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128359

And the video card: GIGABYTE GV-R467D3-512I Radeon HD 4670 512MB, $55 AR FS, excellent card for light gaming.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814125244

They both have free shipping now, so it may dissapear.

Why in the world waste money on a P45 board with that CPU? It would be at 4.3 GHz at only 333 MHz FSB, which even a $40 motherboard could do, and I can't imagine it would go further than that, as I have an E5200 that gets to 4 GHz at max safe voltage. They appear to have a FSB wall there, regardless of the multiplier setting, so spending more money on a motherboard with no significant feature but a potentially high FSB does no good.

Don't fall for the trap of buying a fancy heatsink for this sort of CPU. You'd just be burning money. I believe the E5300s are the newer stepping and will run cooler, while the E5200s are the old one, and using a stock heatsink, it didn't go above 72C when I stress tested it at 4 GHz and 1.425v.

The integrated graphics is a toss up to me. Some are pretty decent, like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... rce%209400

But again, you could completely cheap out on the motherboard, and buy a cheap video card, and it would kill that.

I think you need to be more specific. What is "a decent monitor?" Do you already know what resolution you would be using? I think that's the important part. I got away with a mere 6600GT for the longest time, since I was only running 1280x1024, and the thing only has 128MB of RAM, which is what hurts it in the end. You don't need these crazy new cards for that. However, while a lot of cheaper and integrated ones have 512MB, they are very low bandwidth, so if you're running a higher resolution, you will have to step up a bit.

If you can hold off for a little, I would. New Nvidia and ATI cards are both coming out in January, so the prices are probably going to change quite a bit very quickly, and if ATI makes new 5000 series low end cards, those will undoubtedly be the thing to get.

maybe you got me thinking man...maybe i should just sit a couple more months till cheap nehalem comes by and gets paired with ddr2 memory...im getting a laptop anyway and that should help, but still i miss having all the power on the desktop and using a laptop for light tasks...anyway my reason for going for the e5300 (and paying like 15 to 20 more bucks) was because of the new stepping and the ability to overclock higher, but i just had bad experiences with cheap motherboards and they were so bad i swore never to cheap out on the mobo ever again hahaha...guess i had bad luck, integrated should be enough until i save enough money for a descrete gpu which would be the perfect time window to sit until the next generation of gpus come by, if i decide to do the upgrade now...but its nice anyway to know what to do if either a miracle or a catastrophe come by and im not able to get the laptop, i really had noooo idea for which mobos to go by, and i knew that ASUS and GIGABYTE were the big players on the quality mobo show even if not targeted to enthusiasts, anyway any comments on the wait-till-nehalem-is-sub-200 thing? it may take some time...

Nehalem uses DDR3, most likely there won't be a DDR2 version but who the heck knows. Also cheap MB's for i7 won't be available til the end of '09.

So, go for the Asus board with onboard video, just remember to update the BIOS.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131348

nehalem lga 1366 intended for power users will only be paired with ddr3 memory...or maybe who knows, but the lga (1033? 1066? 1133? 1166? can't remember!) with less pins, (ie cheap nehalem) will be paired with ddr2 memory, if what i read on TR is correct

i just can't seem to find the article!! aarrgg! hahah

ups...sorry my mistake, just checked tha article...guess i misread the "2 channels of ddr3" as "dual channel ddr2 memory" sorry

Kurkotain wrote:

maybe you got me thinking man...maybe i should just sit a couple more months till cheap nehalem comes by and gets paired with ddr2 memory...

Lynnfield is not "a couple more months", more like at least half a year. And you already realize it will still be with DDR3, the thinking is that DDR3 should start to drop in prices by the 2nd half of next year.

I don't know how "cheap" a motherboard you want to get, but the P45 boards are pretty reasonable to me (if you are getting a discrete GPU). If you must go below the magic $100 mark, how soon have we forget the DS3L boards? The UD3P/UD3R boards may be the new hotness with all that copper and such, but the DS3 boards are no slouch either. That line has been a budget overclocking favourite dating all the way back to the 965 days and has been able to maintain that position.

i don't want to be so cheap on the motherboard (not that a 100 dolars is any cheap anyway...) besides i want a workhorse, a motherboard that can stand the constant trashing of tinkering, overclocking (since this would be my first serious overclocking build, you know how it gets, pushing it till you see something smoking hehehe) and constant lan parties, having to pull it of on air cooling, besides i'been terribly unlucky with cheap boards and since where i live its EXTREMELY hard to come by an ASUS or GIGABYTE, only biostar, msi, intel and suckscoon errr.... foxconn so like i siad earlier, if its a good mobo that you could beat someone to death with and later plug in like nothing happened, then im in, even if its 130 or 150 since im not going to be able to just return it by mail if something happens, it has to be a good reliable board, and at a good price point too

Search for "DS3L" in the forums. There were lots of happy people with them. Sometimes cheap is not that cheap.

just checked on the forums and it looks like they are bad overclokers...

Kurkotain wrote:

just checked on the forums and it looks like they are bad overclokers...

TR forums? I remember reading a lot of sucess stories. Of course, hoping you will get 600 FSB is unreasonable.

yeah, TR forums...it was as if the mobo would not even support light overclocking and many of them being DOA...

Dude, seriously, stop worrying about the overclocking capability of the motherboard.

Like I already said before...

An E5300 would be going 4.3 GHz if you are only running standard 333 MHz FSB. And that's probably too much as it is, even with a huge amount of voltage.

There is no overclocking of the motherboard involved here. Practically ANY current motherboard is designed to do that, because quite a few CPUs have used that for their STOCK speed for a long time.

These CPUs with low stock FSBs and very high multipliers take all the fidgeting and overclocking limitations of other components out of the equation. You don't even need a better heatsink. It's quite possible you could just leave the voltage on auto, set it to 266 MHz FSB, and then off you go at 3.5 GHz, even with the stock heatsink on silent mode, and the temperature would be just fine.

If you don't foresee yourself ever replacing a video card down the road with something significantly more powerful, then you can get darn near any motherboard. Even $50 boards now tend to have 16x PCIe 1.1, and that's still enough for anything but the very highest end cards, which probably won't be changing for quite some time.

Kurkotain wrote:

yeah, TR forums...it was as if the mobo would not even support light overclocking and many of them being DOA...

I am going to have to ask for some links. The only negatives that I see mentioned about the DS3L board in this thread. The original problem turned out to be with the HDD and the bad Samsung tool. Jiga's complaint turned out to be the S3G series. So I am really not sure what you are talking about.

Besides, OneArmedScissor is correct. The board was designed for 333x4=1333FSB. The good thing about the E5x00 is that their high multiplier means you don't have to set the FSB to high. You are functioning within normal parameters. One of the biggest newbie mistake is to forgetting to set the RAM to 1.9-2.1V in order to run it at > DDR2-667 speeds. Most boards boot up at 1.8V and just do enough to get you into the BIOS to increase that number.