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Good "budget" 1155 Mobo?

superccs

superccs

Senior member
Getting a i5 2400 next week and was confused by all the H61 P67 Z68 going on with intel board these days.

I am going to use this board for gaming, no dual GPU, want USB 3, and a little bit of OCing.

Prefer MSI, Gigabyte, and ASUS for obvious reasons and would like to spend ~$100 for the board.

What are my options? Frys nearby, no microcenter, been on slickdeals alll week and am thoroughly confused.

hAPpY sT pATtIEs !
 
Personally I'm a big fan of Gigabyte boards, I love my GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard but I got it down to your budget range by getting it in a combo deal with the i5 2500K I bought from Microcenter. However Frys does have a good deal on a Gigabyte board with the GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 motherboard at $99.99 after a $10 mail in rebate. It's a solid board with everything that you want and a few extras that are nice to have.
 
superccs said:
Getting a i5 2400 next week and was confused by all the H61 P67 Z68 going on with intel board these days.

I am going to use this board for gaming, no dual GPU, want USB 3, and a little bit of OCing.

Prefer MSI, Gigabyte, and ASUS for obvious reasons and would like to spend ~$100 for the board.

What are my options? Frys nearby, no microcenter, been on slickdeals alll week and am thoroughly confused.

hAPpY sT pATtIEs !
Click to expand...

I5 2400 = no OCing. The only intel procesors that will overclock are the 2500K and the 26/2700K.
 
Smoblikat said:
I5 2400 = no OCing. The only intel procesors that will overclock are the 2500K and the 26/2700K.
Click to expand...

Yeah because the multiplier is the only way to get things done right?

Re the Giga board you mentioned... I was eye balling that one a little earlier.

Are there any chipsets that I should avoid? the Z68 is the most recent bestest correct?
 
why would you bother trying to force a bus based OC on a locked chip when you can easily hit 4.2-4.7 GHz with air cooling on a k series chip and P67/Z68 motherboard?

I guess you only swim upstream?
 
superccs said:
Yeah because the multiplier is the only way to get things done right?

Re the Giga board you mentioned... I was eye balling that one a little earlier.

Are there any chipsets that I should avoid? the Z68 is the most recent bestest correct?
Click to expand...


If you want to save a few $ and don't mind losing the onboard GPU or SSD caching you can pick up a P67 board instead of a Z68. Be aware though a lot of the budget boards do not allow some of the "better" tweaks for overclocking like offset voltage. Unfortunatly you get what you pay for most the time with mobos and picking up an entry level model can leave you wishing you had spent another 20-30 bucks further down the line.
 
Generally any H67 motherboard will do just fine if you're priorities are budget and non overclocking. Since you're not stressing the motherboard out of its normal specs, it could be almost any H67 motherboard from any brands, so you can pick the cheapest of any. The H67 fits single GPU, USB 3.0 ports and compatible with the Core i5 2400, strictly no overclocking though.
 
With the sandy bridges you can't really OC except by upping the multiplier. You can push the FSB a tiny but but we are talking a few mhz at most, and only with some boards. As only the "k"
models allow you to tweak the multipliers your stuck at stock speeds (not including the turbo boost). With that 2400 as your CPU it really depends on what you want to do for the GPU. If you going to use a dedicated video card and not the onboard video then any of the three chipsets will work. The breakdown goes like this (please correct me other posters if I'm off)

P67 - OC but no onboard video use (great with a dedicated GPU)
H67 - no OC but can use onboard video
Z68 - OC and onboard video as well as some other mostly minor features

My main PC is using a P67 with the 2500k running at 4.4ghz and it works great. I've just built several Z68 setups for friends and my HTPC though in none of the cases did I OC, I only went with the Z68 for future OC possibilities. In all cases I used asrock boards as they have proven to me to be of great quality for a good price.

In your case go with whatever board fits your price range. You won't be able to OC that chip and it sounds like your going to use a video card so the rest does not matter. All the good brands and models include USB3 though some come with more ports than others.

Good luck!
 
Ive had a good experience so far with the asus P8Z68 LX, its cheap, its got UEFI which is something none of the gigabyte boards have they still use the ancient BIOS crap. I would go with that or look into an H67 board thats cheap.
 
superccs said:
Nevermind... I try asking some non-OC nazies.
Click to expand...

You mentioned overclocking in the second sentence of this thread, all you have been given is sound advice regarding the futility of getting much more than 2-300 mhz out of Bclck overclocking and non "K" version chips.

What respose were you actually hoping for?
 
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