E8600/The best mobo

[Xenos]

What would be the best motherboard to purchase in order to overcloc the E8600? Would a stable 4.5ghz on air (120 extreme) be asking too much? Never tried water but am sure water would stretch it measurably higher. But lord knows I dread the leaks.

 

[yh125d]

Gigabyte UD3P-EP45. You could probably hit that on air if you're experienced at OCing.


As for water, if you do it right a leak won't necessarily short anything. Distilled is non-conductive

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I'll give two thumbs up to the GA-EP45-UD3x boards.

I have an E8600 Oc'd to 4.25 Ghz on an eVGA (nVidia) 780i chipset board. A lot of people will say that the 780i -- particularly the eVGA -- is a cherry for over-clocking.

In order to get there "on air," I had to push the VCORE as shown in CPU_Z to 1.34V (at idle).

You may be able to do better than that with the EP45 Gigabyte board -- I can't say from firsthand experience.

Just remember -- while some say you can push VCORE to 1.4V for an E8600, the Intel "safe-range" spec has an upper limit of 1.3625V. Intel has a wider voltage range, or "range of operability" for these chips. The upper limit of this latter range is something like 1.4+V. Intel says that running the chip near the upper limit of the "operability" range will degrade the processor -- they say also that the chip may continue to be serviceable at lower voltages, but the damage is done.

Don't be surprised if your E8600 has defective or "stuck" core-temperature sensors, either. If you intend to stress-test with IBT or Linpack, use a utility like Everest Ultimate which also reports the TCase sensor's temperature reading, and use that as a measuring stick against the processor's thermal spec (which is something like TCASE= 72C).