gaming uATX board?

[gorobei]

Building my gaming PC.
(already have)
-e4300
-noctua 12f
-microfly case w/psu
-ide dvd-rw
-ide HD

(will get)
8800gt or 9p
? x ?GB ddr2 800
g33 or g35 uATX M/B
Vista home prem 64


Got a copy of Crysis, so might as well get Vista 64. So the logical thing to do is get 4GB of ram. The prices for ddr2-800 dictate that I should get 4x1GB. But overclocking with 4 dimms is notoriously difficult.

Anyone have a ASUS p5k vm or GIGABYTE g33 dsr2 working with 4 dimms and vista?
I'm only looking for 3.0-3.2 GHz. Or do I have to settle for 2GB of ram .

(and Yes Serpentroyal, if abit made a uATX board i would try it. But they don't, and the ip35e won't fit in a microfly)

 

[Skott]

I dont run VISTA or 4GB RAM but I know others have done so with a P5K-VM. Your two best mATX mobos currently is the DS2R and the P5K-VM. I lean towards the P5K-VM because it doesnt have any 1:1 divider problems unlike the DS2R. Its also a slightly better OCing mobo. It doesnt have RAID although you could always add a dedicated RAID controller if you wanted RAID. Between the two I say get the P5K-VM. But thats just my opinion.

 

[gorobei]

i don't really need/want raid.

The asus is the current frontrunner, but i read that the latest ds2r bios came out and had much better OC and ram timings. I just want to get as much out of the OC as possible. my next video card will likely be a 512mb-1gb gddr version, so to compensate for memory addressing I figured 64bit 4Gb ram is required.

 

[Skott]

Well, neither mobo will give you trouble with VISTA and 4GB RAM providing you get the correct compatible modules. Which shouldnt be a problem. Sounds like you may be at a stand still as which to choose. If thats the case let your wallet decide for you. Buy the mobo that you can get to your door the cheapest. Last I heard the P5K-VM was about $10-$20 cheaper but shop around since holiday sales are likely starting this week and you can probably find some nice sales or rebates.

 

[Zap]

I have an Asus P5K-VM in an X-Qpack2. It overclocks okay, but tons of Vdroop. Monitoring it, soon as I load the CPU the Vcore drops around 0.05v. I am running it with no problems on 4 sticks of 1GB OCZ Reaper. I do have an occasional problem in that from a cold boot occasionally the BIOS will give some kind of error and claim the chassis had been intruded. Hit the reset button and it boots fine. At the LAN party I went to Saturday someone else had the same Asus board and gets the same error message. Note that I'm using the shipping BIOS, whatever that may be.

Your heatsink choice will not fit the case unless you mod the case, primarily cut away the back end of the HDD support.

If you're planning on using the Ultra V-Series 400W PSU included with the MicroFly case, plan on using something else. A friend of mine had his gaming rig in the MicroFly with that PSU and it worked fine... while he had a Radeon 2600 Pro. He upgraded to an 8800GTS and the system would shut down whenever he ran something 3D. Going to a more powerful PSU resolved that issue. If an 8800GTS was enough to push the PSU over the edge, the 8800GT may be borderline even if it works, so I wouldn't trust it like that long term.

BTW regular ATX boards like the IP-35E will fit the MicroFly/X-Qpack2 cases... if you mod the case to re-orient the motherboard 90º. I've heard rumors that some people have done that, though I can't say that I would.