Whats the cheapest motherboard that will unlock a phenom 2 dual or tricore?

[faxon]

So a friend of mine has a $500 budget for a case/psu (newegg combo 690+silent pro 600), mobo, cpu, gpu, ram, and a hard drive. i priced out a rig with a 720BE, a 785GM-US2H (gigabyte), 2x2gb of G.Skill DDR2, an HD4850, and a Caviar Blue 640gb, with the coolermaster case/psu combo for the 690+silent pro 600w. the price after tax (yay california) came out to aprox $590. what im wondering is if this board, or something in its price class, could unlock an x2 550 or x3 720. i dont much care about the manufacturer but im partial to gigabyte boards after my experience with my 2 UD3P boards. if i can shave $40 off the price tag for the cpu, i could give him a cooler i have now and help him overclock/unlock it. the issue is, most of the boards i have seen for unlocking are over $100, and im wondering if anyone knows of anything cheap that you can use to do this with. he isnt buying right away, and this all might change when i3 CPUs launch, but unless there are $80 cpus and mobos at launch, he will probably just end up getting something AMD anyway, once they drop their prices.

so again, any board that can unlock a phenom 2 550 or 720, whats the cheapest one, and is it less than $100

 

[o1die]

The model you chose still has free shipping (newegg), so it's a good choice. Asrock makes a board with older 780 chipset for $10 less, but no free shipping, so they both cost about the same. Ecs may also make a low cost board, but they don't overclock or unlock cores as easily as other brands.

 

[faxon]

yea i picked the 785G chipset since, in a pinch, it will play source games at playable framerates for him (TF2 in particular). this was the primary reason he wanted it now, but i reminded him of how much he wanted to play starcraft 2 and diablo 3 when they come out. he is currently still using a pentium 3 based system with an ATI RAGE PRO running windows 98 as his desktop, and he has a linux based netbook as well, though it still isnt fast enough to do anything worth while, nor does it have the disk space. if you're positive the board is capable of unlocking, i will talk to him tomorrow and see when he can have enough cash by.

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813138140

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813130237

The 790GX has a faster GPU due to the higher clock speed but the 785 has the extra features of the 4xxx series. The BIOSTAR has 128mb of Side-Port memory.

 

[ghopper50]

I just purchased a gigabyte 785G-UD3H with a 720BE tri core. I've currently overclocked it a bit to 3.4 gh on default Vcore, but I still haven't tried to unlock the 4th core. I'd be willing to do so, if someone can walk me thru it. I know the bios has the option to do it, just want to know the exact step to undue it if it fails. If someone can provide that info, I'll give it a go. My board using DDR2 memory cost $89.00 I believe.

Dan

 

[ghopper50]

I went ahead and after some reading set the bios to hybrid with everything else at stock values. It booted into winxp and CPUID shows as deneb with 4 cores. I started a run of 3DMark06 and it crashed to desktop right after starting the Proxycon test. Bottom line my 720BE unlocked with this board, but not stable at default values. So the 785 chipsets on the gigabyte boards (at least on mine) did sucessfully unlock the chip. I just did it to test, so I've reset to 3 cores and trying 3.5 gh at default vcore now.

Dan