[Solved] Mobo upgrade - [New] Bulldozer Price Ranges

**The Black Reaper** · June 10, 2011, 04:15 AM

So I'm planning on upgrading my motherboard and cpu sometime at the end of august or beginning of september and I just wanted to get some feedback on the parts that I'm looking at as well as a few suggestions for mobo upgrades. Trying to stay as close as i can to $150 but depending on a great quality board that is affordable I would probably buy that too if its just $20 over budget. Anyways the two mobos i'm looking are:

ASRock P67 EXTREME4

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157229

and the ASUS P8P67 PRO

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-703-_-Product

I haven't really done that much research on these boards besides looking at the review scores on the site. I was just wondering if anyone has worked with either of these boards and what can I expect from overclocking with these two boards. Are the bios easy to navigate?

Also feel free to recommend any boards but if it goes above $200 then thats too much, but i will keep an eye on it because prices will go down by the time i upgrade.

**Pantsalot** · June 10, 2011, 05:36 AM

ASRock is a fine alternative to ASUS but it would appear ASUS generally beats it even between these two, go with that but
September is quite a while away so you might want to wait a bit & see if anything new comes in, maybe the Z68 motherboards
will step up their game.

**snuggans** · June 10, 2011, 07:03 AM

i am using the P8P67 Deluxe, which is indeed out of your price range, but at least gives me some experience with the P67 line from Asus. i think you're going to want to get the Pro or the Evo http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...%20p8p67%20evo
both AsRock and ASUS boards have the UEFI bios. it's pretty nice and intuitive in advanced mode. the Pro/Evo have Intel-based LAN instead of Realtek, and Bluetooth support. i also believe the Pro/Evo south bridge lights up, if you're into aesthetics.

i guess when it comes down to it, choose for the company. i'm not quite sure which one has more reliable customer service.

**Crazyeyesreaper** · June 10, 2011, 03:45 PM

P8P67 PRO is perfectly fine and all motherboards in the P67 range use UEFI to an extent but ASUS does have the best UEFI bios available right now. basically UEFI is new and not all companies are equal with there BIOS right now ASUS is pretty much the defacto king when it comes to UEFI for the time being,

Asrock is a subsidiary of ASUS basically a larger company owns both motherboard manufacturers that said Asus tends to be the more reliable of the 2 but Asrock is still pretty solid but there still a Mid range to lower High end manufacturer where as Asus is in the TOP end namely Asus being #1 and Gigabyte being #2, id go with ASUS primarily for the better bios, and overall slightly higher quality.

**The Black Reaper** · June 10, 2011, 11:26 PM

So i decided to go with Asus since I do trust Asus since i'm using one of their boards right now and its a great overclocking board. Out of the P8P67 boards there are three different classifications. The pro, the evo, and the deluxe. What exactly is the difference between these three boards? Does the overclock capabilities differ from board to board or are they fairly similar?

**The Black Reaper** · June 11, 2011, 03:36 AM

Did my own research over the past 4 hours. Decided that i didn't need the extras that came with the evo and deluxe and that the pro would be able to give me what i want for a reasonable price. Also gonna purchase a noctua nh-d14 to cool my new cpu. Gonna also buy a haf 922 case in august and buy the parts in september so i can spread out my money and be able to pay for all of it. Right now all together its gonna run me a good $600 for all the upgrades I'll be doing at the end of the summer. HOPEFULLY the prices will go down by then saving me another $50. The fact that there is no newegg warehouse where i live as well so i dont get charged sales tax..

Eventually by the end of the year I will be running a SSD boot up drive with 2 1 tb drives as well as a corsair AX850 PSU powering my SLI GTX 580s..... way to much money but i will definately have my new PSU by the end of the year and i was kidding about SLI 580s.. haha but with the final psu upgrades, my comp will last me for a long time.

EDIT: Oh and on top of price drops, bulldozers should be out by the end of next month to early August from what I've seen and seeing that the new 8-core processors from AMD will only cost $320 and compete with the i7-2600k, we might as well see a price drop for sandy bridges coming soon

from price estimates that i've seen,

8-core - $320 and $290 for slower alternative - Possible competitors for i7 Sandy Bridge
6-core - $240
4-core - $190

Hopefully the new 4 core cpu will have great a great performance to price ratio effectively forcing intel to reduce the prices of their sandy bridges which i still am planning on getting.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/...essor-320/6098

http://tech2.in.com/news/cpus/fastes...-at-320/220482

**Pantsalot** · June 11, 2011, 06:17 AM

Originally Posted by The Black Reaper

What exactly is the difference between these three boards? Does the overclock capabilities differ from board to board or are they fairly similar?

The highlighting difference between the boards is a increase in phase power which is supposed to increase
the speed of the board as whole though I have a 24 Phase Power connector which is 6 Phase Power higher
than the Deluxe but I'm not too sure if there's a noticeable difference. Also as you've noticed there's some
slight port alterations for USB 3.0 & 2.0 for example.

Originally Posted by The Black Reaper

Eventually by the end of the year I will be running a SSD boot up drive with 2 1 tb drives

If you're going to do that then depending on the size of the SSD you may prefer to get a Z68 board so
that the SSD can act as a cache for the hard drives, Z68s are generally more expensive than P67 boards
but they have a numerous intriguing features & some have onboard graphics which some people are quite
keen on, especially those who OC their GPU.

**Crazyeyesreaper** · June 11, 2011, 08:27 AM

Bulldozer is delayed volume shipments aka real availability wont happen till Early September Late october, that said current bench results from B0 aka hot and power hungry as it was first samples at 2.8ghz Bulldozer 8 core is unable to even beat the first gen i7 860 or i7 920 in multi threaded bench tests namely Cinebench R11.5 which is a fairly good test of multi threaded performance,

the top of the Line 8 core Bulldozer is only going to compete with the Sandybridge 2600k and the lower clocked 8 core chips with the 2500k, so there gonna be late and only offer roughly equal performance. But if you really like AMD wait it out

i love AMD cpus had more luck with overclocking there chips but i cant be asked to wait anymore for them to release, Bulldozer has been in the works for nearly 5 years + and still they couldnt quite get the job done on time.

**Devilmaypoop** · June 11, 2011, 09:50 AM

Originally Posted by Crazyeyesreaper

Bulldozer is delayed volume shipments aka real availability wont happen till Early September Late october, that said current bench results from B0 aka hot and power hungry as it was first samples at 2.8ghz Bulldozer 8 core is unable to even beat the first gen i7 860 or i7 920 in multi threaded bench tests namely Cinebench R11.5 which is a fairly good test of multi threaded performance,

The B0 stepping indeed is horrible, it is slower clock for clock than a Phenom II

Hopefully C0 will fix this.

**Top-Tier-Tech** · June 11, 2011, 02:12 PM

Originally Posted by Crazyeyesreaper

i love AMD cpus had more luck with overclocking there chips

Just get a 2600k and overclock it to 5.0Ghz. on air like everyone else

**snuggans** · June 12, 2011, 01:50 AM

Originally Posted by ChaobSiroc

Just get a 2600k and overclock it to 5.0Ghz. on air like everyone else

to get it to 5.0ghz you would have to raise voltage somewhere over 1.35v, which is where you start seeing the reduction of the longevity of the CPU. if you're the type of person that is constantly upgrading their components then i wouldn't worry about it and just go for the short-term speed boost.

i have a 2500k set to a stable 4.4ghz at 1.30v but i think i've long since hit the CPU performance wall. it's now all up to the video card.

**Crazyeyesreaper** · June 11, 2011, 01:39 PM

B0 is so broken that it runs at 2.8 not 3.8 turbo core is broken etc etc just a terrible stepping B1 is also broken it was what was shown at Computec, B2 stepping due late august early septebler should fix all those issues key word is should

**Crazyeyesreaper** · June 11, 2011, 02:44 PM

ill be going 2500k, the 4 extra threads offer no performance benefit for what ill be doing

but yea im going Intel end of this month, need to wait for a buddy of mine in Canada to finish a few more Asus motherboard reviews then i get my choice of any P67 or Z68 board he has on hand for free woot

**Top-Tier-Tech** · June 12, 2011, 02:41 AM

I watched a video on Newegg where they got an i7-2600k to 4.8ghz. with the built in auto overclocker on an Asus board without a voltage tweak it seems.