Q9550 LGA775 OC motherboard?

[Mobs]

Hi

I am new to overclocking and I want to buy a new or used motherboard to experiment oc with my q9550 cpu. I am having hard time finding a motherboard which can uses standard psu as well as overclocking support.

I have OEM motherboard which has ddr2 6gb ram and non standard psu so I cannot upgrade that and psu is only 240W. Ideally since i got new case I want to host new mobo in there while using parts from HP DC7800 eg ram hdd etc.

I would be greatly appreciate if someone can help me find a motherboard which can fit the bill.

Thank you.

 

[tnx]

Sound like you could do with an Abit IP35 Pro...

I wonder who would have one of those ??????

 

[pastymuncher]

Hi and welcome to the forums.

Argueably the best overclocking boards for the Q9550 were the Asus P45 boards such as the P5Q-E/Pro/Pro Turbo/Deluxe. I had a Asus P5Q Pro Turbo and got my old Q9550 to 4.13Ghz in it. We had a excellent thread on here where we all put our overclocking settings which can be found here. Just don't go spending too much money on such a old outdated platform.

 

[Mobs]

@pastymuncher

Thank you for the reply. Yes I wont spend bucket tone of money on it i just want to find a cheap used board which would give me chance to play around with oc. If you dont mind could you please recommend me these oc mobos either on ebay or other websites.

Thank

 

[Rroff]

P45 were way better in my experience with the Q9550 - P35 boards were mostly designed before the 45nm cores and later compatability patched. Had mine stable beyond 4.5GHz on a P45 board while 4GHz max on others.

 

[Mobs]

Yh I have heard but I am having hard time finding one.

 

[Mobs]

Found a ASUS P5Q SE PLUS P45 on ebay for £55 is it worth because this board came out way back in 2009 or maybe before yet still it cost a lot! Dont get me wrong the motherboard itself is a beast. Here is a link to it https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5Q_SE_PLUS/.

 

[pastymuncher]

No, that's just a rip off. I would rather bin the lot and start over than pay that much for a obsolete board. I wouldn't be paying any more than £20-25. Wow, I just had a look on Ebay and can't believe the prices they are asking for such old motherboards. In most cases they are more expensive than a brand new entry level board on AMD's current AM4 socket. I would give up on that as a bad idea.

 

[Mobs]

My thought exactly I was honestly looking for the prices between the range you mention 20-25 30 at most but anything above is pure ripp off. You can get brand new mobo which are advanced and worth their money compare to this joke of price. Yh sadly I have to call this off because I was hopping to spend 20-30 to mess around but prices are just a joke.

 

[Mobs]

Its gona be a long shot but I will try to get unlocked AMD motherboard and cpu for £50 which supports ddr2. Doubt ill find it! Worth a try I suppose.

Btw I want a second opinion on psu when you come to buy a new one and there are cheap ones for like 15-20 pound for 500 to 600 watts but they have 50/50 rating some work some blow up. I personally want to get the evga 430w for around £40.

Whats your view on this?

 

[pastymuncher]

Don't waste your money. Anything AMD from that era will be worse performing than the Q9550. Just split the components up and sell them seperately then put that money towards a more up to date budget pc.

As for psu's, you won't want to know my opinion because the psu is the one place that you shouldn't skimp. Anybody who buys these £15-20 psu's is a idiot. They are not capable of anywhere near their stated output and when they fail are highly likely to kill other components. Even the EVGA 430w while better than these garbage cheap psu's at the end of the day it's still rubbish.

 

[Mobs]

Thanks that would be a good idea, I already have a gaming pc whom specs are in my signature. Also I have found this motherboard ASUS Motherboard P5N-E SLI on ebay and im the highest bidder at £36 plus £3.80 postage so total cost would be around £40 i know this is not ideal and it is on the rip off side but I will win in the bidding this would save me the hassle of selling all the parts one by one.

Also I agree with you totally on the psu and I share the same view and I understand evga is not the best psu but it is 80+ certified and anyways I would rather go for a evga 500w for £40 which should be find for budget bulid with not heavy gaming just overclocking if mobo allows it.

 

[pastymuncher]

The Nvidia chipsets were useless with the 45nm quads. It's a P45 chipset board or nothing. Anything else is a waste of time. Your Q9550 isn't even on the cpu support list for the P5N-E SLI so cancel your bid if you can. Do some research before blindly bidding on a board.

It's not that EVGA are poor, that particular psu is rubbish. Some of EVGA's psu's suchas the G2/G3/P2/T2 ranges are amongst the best psu's that you can buy. EVGA just like Corsair, Bitfenix, Antec and most of the others don't make their own psu's. The actual psu's are made by third party OEM's such as Superflower, Seasonic, CWT etc. The EVGA 430w is a unit built by HEC who tend to make low quality budget psu's and the EVGA 430w is just that, a low quality budget psu with cheap internals. Have a read of this review of the EVGA 430w and you may change your mind about it. I would never recommend that psu as I never recommend to others a psu that I wouldn't be happy using myself.

 

[Rroff]

Yeah - my old nForce 750i based board - even being the fancy FTW variety couldn't get my Q9550 above 4GHz, the P5N32-E SLI couldn't get above 3.825GHz and ended up like this after being RMA'd 3 times http://www.aten-hosted.com/images/DSC00524S.jpg while on a P45 it did 4.5GHz with ease.

Sadly the best of the nForce implementations was the Gigabyte 650 which predated 45nm quads. Though as I have a Q9550 and a 771 Xeon E5440 plus a Gigabyte 650 DS4L and some fancy OCZ blade RAM hanging around in spare parts I might have a whirl see what I can get going - though rumours are on the 650 45nm quads just result in a lot of blue screens even if you can get them going with the lacking BIOS updated microcode to support them.

 

[Mobs]

I have paid for the motherboard but I have sent message to seller to cancel it. But if the seller doesnt cancel it would the board work well with duo core e8400 since i have this cpu laying around and it is also supported. I did look at the motherboard cpu support list and for some reason i didnt bother to look past q6600 since i blindly thought q9550 would be supported this was my fault ill learn from this.

I have ordered evga 500w psu for £38, hope i didnt screw this one over too

 

[Rroff]

The P5N32-E SLI is pretty hit and miss but the bad ones would usually die/degrade pretty early on so if its been running awhile fine its probably a better example of the board.

The bad ones the BGA connection solder between the chipset and the motherboard would easily loosen under any flexing of the board causing all kinds of unpredictable issues, the DIMM sockets would degrade in 2-4 months causing random instability and the NICs would slowly become increasingly more problematic until failing entirely well inside a year and Asus just round-robined the failing boards as replacements out to customers RMAing their failing board - hence taking a hammer to the board above in the end just to be shot of the whole sorry story... only to repeat it again when I made the mistake of buying the Asus ROG Swift PG278Q

Point being if its sold as working then its probably not one of the more problematic ones and might overclock better.

 

[Mobs]

its P5N-E SLI not P5N32-E SLI! Pardon me if im mistaken

 

[Rroff]

Ah I must have misread somewhere - ignore me than don't have experience with that board.

Though as its based on the 650i probably have issues with 45nm quads though it will handle 45nm duals.

 

[Mobs]

Its cancelled so dont need to worry and its not worth it going for other board apart from p45 like the pasty mentioned so I will go for a normal lga 775 board which allows me to use standard psu.