What is your expectation for micro-ATX mobos to OC Conroe?

[nosliw]

The market doesn't currently offer a rich set of choices for Conroe owners who want to overclock this CPU on a micro-ATX motherboard.

Given that this CPU has such potential, do you think that the major motherboard manufacturers will be rolling out choices that have reasonable overclocking capabilities in a micro-atx format? To what extent do you expect?

What have been the historical trends regarding oc'ing on u-atx, and have there been significant exceptions?

Ed

 

[Thor86]

Zero. I've never seen any M-ATX boards that oc, even a little.

 

[nosliw]

Thanks. I've heard of folks recently being able to take an ASRock 775i65G with an E6300 from the stock 266 FSB up to 300 MHz. That only represents about a 12% overclock.

The E6300 seems comfortably capable of 50-70% (2.8-3.15 GHz), with some reports of aircooled oc's as high as the 90% range (3.58 GHz). It would be a shame to not be able to tap that potential in a micro-atx.

I'd pay a premium price for a micro-atx version of the Asus P5B. (with all of the ocing abilities)

Ed

Thread includes report of the 775i65G @ 300:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=29&threadid=1914181&forumid=1

A Conroe Database:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1075792

 

[xbassman]

I'd pay a premium price for a micro-atx version of the Asus P5B

Yep....so would I.

Too bad it doesn't have a good bios revision yet.

ASUS P5B-VM Socket T (LGA 775) Intel G965 Express Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail

 

[nosliw]

I've heard that the P5B-VM is limited to 1144 FSB (286) which is a scant 7%. It doesn't have pci lock.

 

[Trey22]

Originally posted by: nosliw
I've heard that the P5B-VM is limited to 1144 FSB (286) which is a scant 7%. It doesn't have pci lock.

Last BIOS release was 9/14, hopefully they put out another REAL SOON (w/ PCI lock and upped mem voltage), so I can grab one of these boards.

Absolutely ridiculous that Asus blundered on this board. They have a small window of opportunity to fix this.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Thor86
Zero. I've never seen any M-ATX boards that oc, even a little.

You just haven't seen the right boards. There are a few in the socket 754/939/AM2 realm using the Geforce 6100 chipset and the ATI IGP chipset (whatever model is) that are mATX and can OC with the best. Asus also made some SiS chipset socket 478 boards that were nicely overclockable though sans voltage adjustments.

As for socket 775, there currently are a few that can be overclocked, but not even close to the levels that would take advantage of a Core 2 Duo's capabilities. Some have used them for overclocking Pentium D chips since those start with a low FSB and high multiplier, as compared to Core 2 Duo.

Generally speaking I don't think any of the major motherboard manufacturers will be making a super overclocker mATX Core 2 Duo board anytime soon because those will probably cut into their profitable higher end ATX board sales. I think it'll be up to some smaller players to bring out really overclockable mATX C2D boards. Ones that have, at least for AMD chips, are DFI (AFAIK a single board), Biostar (6 boards) and Jetway (also a single board).