ASUS P5B-Deluxe Wifi-AP vs. ABIT AW9D-MAX and others..

[HomeTeam]

Hey gang,
I had been reading, reading and re-reading the reviews here at AT for some time, when the ASUS P5B and ABIT AW9D-MAX first arrived, and have since fallen to the wayside (or work side) with my reading.. I set aside a list of items for my next PC project, which I am now ready to take on....the question is this:
WHAT MB SHOULD I GO WITH?? I want to overclock an E6300 or E6400 CPU (possibly an E6600) and use 2 GBs of Low Latency RAM, a single GPU and SATA RAID. Now, as I have been reading, there is a slew of new boards prepped to hit the market soon, with a whole new level of features/performance. I won't be running many games, nor DUAL Video cards - so the most important thing to me is the most SPEED per BUCK.

What are your thoughts, recommendations? And why? What about these new boards? or the ASUS Commando. etc. do you like?

I know this thread, and your expertise will help out many in my shows and I thank you for the assistance. AT rocks!

 

[treker]

Biggest bang for my overclock buck RIGHT NOW, is the Gigabyte GA965P-DS3 Rev1.3 for under $100 shipped. Many places have it in that price range. The Egg comes to mind. 500mhz is easy with E6400. I'm using it's twin brother (Rev3.3) with E6400 at 25% overclock and 20% undervolting for very cool running. I did add 40mm fan on 5V to NB...now it too is running cool.

I have the Abit AW9D-MAX. I liked it and could OC quite well, hitting 420mhz easily at stock voltage. But I live in Tucson and I am more interested in cool pc rather than faster. The MAX does not allow undervolting for cooler operation, so you might as well overclock for the same temperature.

I like the Gigabyte mobo much better for my purposes.

 

[Rafael]

First of all, welcome to AT Forums!

I agree that the P965 is the best bang for bucks right now due to the prices drops after the launch of the P35.
I would take out the Abit even though I is a good board, and has a good performance. But since you are going to use a CPU with a lower multiplier and invest your money in good RAM, I would the AW9 out of the equation, because you can't hit high FSB frequencies.
Among the P965 contenders the Abit QuadGT and DFI Infinity 965-S Dark, both have better performance than the P5B Deluxe. But both have issues one with SATA, and the other with power supplies. But the manufactures have been working on these issues.

Personally I would go with P35 even though they are very recent right now and problems are rising up in the horizon, but the P965 was like that too when it launched. And it is a mature chipset with better memory performance even more with tight timings, and Asus P5K, Abit IP35, Gigabyte P35-DS3 and DQ6 are good overclockers.
Besides that you will have official support for the up coming 45 nm CPUs. What you don't get with the P965.

So it would be good to consider all these points before you choose your mobo between those 2 options.

Rafael