Well, The board right now that is the 2nd highest clocking for conroe is a Foxconn board (470MHz FSB!)
Anyway. I think rather wait for a DFI board (590) or forget NV chipsets and look to the RD600 boards.
Right now with me I have the Crosshair board/Abit AN9 Fatal1ty (also 590 SLI) and had MSI K9N Platinum and the SLI Platinum (Both 570/MCP55) and Asus M2N32 SLI (Also 590 SLI).
Highest clocks so far have been with the MSI boards, which are not ideal for clocking. Why? Well PCI frequency is unlocked i.e overclock HT speed and PCI clock goes up as well... I know its very arecane for any board to have such problems, but both the SLI and non-SLI board had same problem
End result: Maximum CPU clock =2.92GHZ (292x10) on ******IAAC6S MPAW core CPU which was still at stock volts. =MSI K9N (PCI bus was at 48.8MHz!!
)
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Asus: Had Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe WiFi edition. := D.O.A (twice!)
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Got Crosshair? :/ No good!
Asus seems to think DFI got fame because they just stuffed loads of settings into the bios and that's that. However that is not what made arguably the best AXP/A64 754++939 boards ever.
Asus Crosshair even gives you DRAM on die termination voltage with sqew and mOH adjustments. A sure way to kill your CPU!
You also have options to set ram from 1.8 ~ 3.45V!!!
A sure way to kill your DDR2 as well. (No Micron/Elpidia/Hynix/Infineon/Samsung/Winbond DDR2 chips will even tolerate 3V!)
There are more ram settings there than three DFI boards put together.
Along with:
SB->NB Voltage
SB link width
NB Link width
HT link width
SB Voltage
NB voltage
HT voltage
HT-CPU voltage
NB->HT Voltage
etc... (imagine scrolling menus here)
All adjustable to within millivolts.
And about 500 more things that will end in tears for you if you change them!
What I'm saying is it's over engineered and ultimately pointless with Zero Focus. You're better of with M2N32-SLI if you can find one that works that is. (also it is not compatible with OCZ PC8K XTC ram)
End result:Maximum CPU clock =2.7GHZ (270x10)
Abit AN9 Fatal1ty 32X
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So far so good, but failing to boot past 2.8GHz into windows... :/
SB-NB-PWM IC area cooling is no good. (Better than the MSI which I had to add active cooling too, as the NB was cooking itself! 70'C+)
Red Bios screen is a no, no! Also over engineered and ultrimately falling short.
All these boards (except MSI) have a locked PCI frequency, yet they can't match the cheapset board of the lot. And they all cost between R2.5K ~ R3.1K apart from the MSI boards which are under R1.5K
You do the maths!
This looks to be the NV 590 SLI chipset failing or... Dodgy and over eager ideas by both Abit and Asus and sloppy design by MSI
So wait for DFI or forget the chipset entirely and go for RD600 when available.
Or get the MSI even. If your CPU has at least 11X multi you can go to ~3.1GHZ or so.
I would though avoid the hair and the fatal1ty at least for now.
