Building an OC system for a Q9550

[Caveman]

System will be air before transitioning to Water Cooling where I hope to get 4+ GHz

Vid card will be 280 GTX. I'll probably try 2X SLI at some future date...

Looking to get ASUS PQ5 or Gigabyte board...

Any recommendations?

 

[DSF]

A P5Q isn't going to be able to run SLi. If you're serious about that you'll need an Nvidia chipset board.

That said, I'd personally skip the SLi.

 

[OCGuy]

Originally posted by: Caveman
System will be air before transitioning to Water Cooling where I hope to get 4+ GHz

Vid card will be 280 GTX. I'll probably try 2X SLI at some future date...

Looking to get ASUS PQ5 or Gigabyte board...

Any recommendations?

780i "FTW" edition if you want an SLI board.

Otherwise, the ASUS will be fine.

 

[Caveman]

Okay,

How about memory... There's a give away price for Corsair 1066 RAM right now... but it's 2 x 1GB.

System will have 4 GB of RAM

Is using 4 sticks of 1 GB RAM slower than 2 sticks at 2GB/ea?

 

[OCGuy]

Originally posted by: Caveman
Okay,

How about memory... There's a give away price for Corsair 1066 RAM right now... but it's 2 x 1GB.

System will have 4 GB of RAM

Is using 4 sticks of 1 GB RAM slower than 2 sticks at 2GB/ea?

It is harder on your Northbridge. I think the general consensus is that 2X2 GB would be alot easier on your system.

 

[OCNewbie]

Get the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P. Seems to be THE choice for OC'ng quads, especially the Q9550.

Do a google search for that combo and check out xtremesystems.org? and overclockers.net (something like that). They have 30+ page threads devoted to that motherboard OC'ng quads and that mobo in general.

 

[zerogear]

Originally posted by: Caveman
System will be air before transitioning to Water Cooling where I hope to get 4+ GHz

Vid card will be 280 GTX. I'll probably try 2X SLI at some future date...

Looking to get ASUS PQ5 or Gigabyte board...

Any recommendations?

nVidia Chipset as above said, but honestly, I find NVIDIA chipsets to be kinda crappy & unstable for OC.

 

[TidusZ]

I second the UD3P / UD3R (Go for the R since your not using ati cards), the Asus gets lots of recommendations but then you buy it and try to overclock and max out at like 460 fsb, whereas the UD3R will go well over 500. There really is no choice.