Looking for mobo to match Opy 165

[TigerClaw27]

Hi, I picked up an Opteron 165 CCBWE 0550 UPMW, and planned to get a DFI LanParty Ultra-D for it, however its out of stock everywhere I look locally (Vancouver BC), and the ETA for any stock is 2 weeks.

Are there any alternate motherboard I could look at, preferably something with NF4 chipset (ultra or non), only requirement I have is that the HTT be stable upto say 310 ~ 315 Mhz, since I'd like to get a nice overclock out of this chip. At 300 Mhz would give me a 2.7Ghz overclock on air, and I'd be satisfied at that speed.

A buddy of mine has a Opy 144 running on an Asus A8N5X, but I think his HTT is limiting his overclock (max 295 ?), so he cant get past 2.66 stable. Alot of my local stores stock AsRock, Asus, and MSI, and some Gigabyte too. Any chance I'll find a decent mobo?

Also I'd like to avoid SLI mobos, since I just dont need that feature, and rather not pay for it.

Thanks,
TC27


PS: If anyone know where I can pickup a DFI LanParty Ultra-D locally in Vancouver BC, let me know.

 

[TigerClaw27]

I've come up with 2 alternatives:

Abit AN8 Ultra 2.0, There where a few early reviews that werent too favorable to this board, but its suppose to be a good overclocker, can anyone confirm this?
Epox EP-9NPA+, Again said to be a good overclocker, however I dont know how hard it is to get this board locally.

Are there any Asus boards that can hit 300Mhz+ on the HTT bus with a voltage increase, if thats even possible in the Asus BIOS?

 

[TigerClaw27]

Anyways, I ended up going with an Asus A8N-E.

Its running at 330 HTT x 8 = 2.64 Ghz, 295 x 9 ~ 2.66 Ghz is also stable at 1.35Vcore (reported to be 1.376 ~ 1.392V by sensors). This is all on stock cooling, so my temps are a bit high (64C with load, 51 without), before the OC the temps were only a bit lower (59C load, 49C noload), so its not a huge jump. Once I get some silver thermal paste, and another fan or two, it should be a bit cooler.

The A8N-E has a Temp3 being reported in speedfan, I assume this is a sensor next to the mobo's MOSFETs? Its a bit high when OCd 110C, so hopefully the board wont burn out, I plan on putting AS between the mosfets and their heatsinks.

I tried for a few minutes running at 1.40 and 1.425 Vcore, but once i saw the CPU temp go above 70C, and the MOSFETs were at 127C, I decided to terminate the test.

TC