So I have a spare e2160 and 2x1GB of OCZ DDR2-667 lying around...

[Ichigo]

I've googled.

Most of the motherboards suggested aren't being sold retail anymore. Things like the Gigabyte P35-DS3L have been replaced by the EP35-DS3L, which some people have reported as having problems with Vdroop and BIOS settings not being saved.

I was thinking of buying a $100 motherboard that has a good chance of breaking 3.0Ghz with this chip and an HD4870 1GB that I could carry over to a future upgrade to i7 next year or something.

ASUS has some P5K-SE that might work but I'm not sure if that would suffer the same issues that Gigabyte is allegedly having.

 

[JonW]

If you can find a P5K Pro or P5K-E for the price you are willing to shell out. I'd look into those 2 mb's. The bios are pretty straight forward. There are also other P35 chipset that might interest you such as Abit IP35 Pro, Foxconn Mars etc.....

For easy bios oc'ing, I suggest this mb. Although not as efficient to those that I mentioned earlier in terms of memory bandwidth.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813138123
The auto settings on this mb gives you a general idea to where your settings need to be. At the end, all you need to do is to start dropping voltages from the auto settings as sometimes it raises these voltages a notch or 2 higher for stable operations.

Goodluck,

 

[Concillian]

e2160 is 400 FSB. You don't need any kind of special motherboard, any modern board is going to have headroom to 400 FSB, which is way over 3.0GHz. So all you really need is a board with ability to add voltage. Most P35 or P43 or P43 boards will suit your needs. You don't need anything special.

vdroop is nothing to be worried about. If you are really concerned about it, ASUS boards have an option to disable it (I think they call it voltage line calibration or some such).