Best bus-overclocking board available new today for a Thuban?

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,571
10,207
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Let's ponder the possibilities of me digging out my two Thuban 1045T CPUs and OCing them.

I've got one in an ASRock 990FX Extreme4, the other in some MSI AM2+ board. The one in the 990FX board was OCed from 2.7/3.2T to 3.51 (no turbo), at pretty-much stock 1.325V or 1.35V.

OS will be Win7 Pro, but would like to option of moving to Win10. UEFI support is a must.

Will likely not need SLI. Tried it out with a pair of GTX460 1GB OC cards on 990FX, and one of them was always running hotter than I like, and I was getting errors.

I'm tentatively going to say that I'll stick with ATX. Would like "beefy" VRMs, with cooling (heatsink).

May upgrade to 32GB DDR3 (4x8GB) on each rig.

GIGABYTE GA-990FX-Gaming AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G3UK3147

GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 Ultra (rev. 1.0) AM3+/AM3 AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Motherboards - AMD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128937

What's the difference between these two mobos, other than the price?

Edit: Seems that the main difference is the "Gaming" board has a Killer 2201 NIC. Don't want "Killer NIC", I like the option of being able to run alternative OSes.
 
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Smoblikat

Diamond Member
Nov 19, 2011
5,184
107
106
Ive owned several AM3/+ boards for both my thubans (1055T and 1090T) and can say with great confidence that this is my favorite board ive ever ran them in:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131631

Ive owned 3 of them. I also have an ASRock 990FX extreme3 and like it for everything but OCing. I had to run my 1090T in that board because I couldnt OC the bus nearly as far as I could on the ASUS board. I know the ASUS board cant be bought new anymore, but I fully endorse its OCing capabilities. Ive run my 1055T in it for years at 3.8, and ive done some torture tests at 4.1 in it too.

EDIT - Im pretty sure the ASUS board is capped at 16gb RAM, so if you need the full 32 it isnt really an option.
 
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Joepublic2

Golden Member
Jan 22, 2005
1,097
6
76
Edit: Seems that the main difference is the "Gaming" board has a Killer 2201 NIC. Don't want "Killer NIC", I like the option of being able to run alternative OSes.

My z97 board has the same NIC, and while it's a step down from the Intel NIC on my last board, it does work with mainline linux kernels. I could fire up a FreeBSD boot disk and test that too if you want. Qualcomm bought Bigfoot Networks several years ago and the new killer NICs are basically just rebranded Qualcomm chips with a special software stack on windows platforms (that you don't have to use, I'm using their basic windows driver).

Edit: Can't find it on the FreeBSD HCL: https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/support.html

Edit 2: Definitely doesn't work with FreeBSD. Neither does booting in UEFI mode off the boot dvd?! :eek:
 
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