mATX board for Conroe. Which is good for quiet PC?

sgtspiff · Post by **sgtspiff** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 12:18 am

Going to get a new Pc and a question poped up;

Which mobo should you get for quiet computing?

It must be a mATX. Ofcourse it must be passively cooled but some brands are better then other to make the computer quiet (really don't know how though).

Right now it is this mobo I got in mind just because it's cheap;

http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3 ... odelmenu=1

Any other suggestions?

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 4:44 am

The Asrock equivalent: CONROE945G-DVI. DVI out and Windows Vistaâ„¢ Premium level HD Audio, which the Asus mobo don't have. Besides, it cost less.

sgtspiff · Post by **sgtspiff** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 5:03 am

Would the Ninja fit on the board? (thinking about the RAMs closeness to CPU).

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 5:37 am

sgtspiff wrote:Would the Ninja fit on the board? (thinking about the RAMs closeness to CPU).

The HS mounting holes are placed in a 72 x 72 mm square.
The Scythe Ninja is 110 x 110 mm. That battery on the mobo is 19 mm in diameter, and you need 19 mm ((110 - 72)/2) in each direction beyond the holes, so I'd say it's safe. See photo.

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 3:33 pm

Mats wrote:The Asrock equivalent: CONROE945G-DVI.

One downside to this board is that if you overclock and use Standby (S3), when you return from standby the FSB resets to 266. Not such a big deal as it typically only overclocks to 299 anyway.

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 6:32 pm

smilingcrow wrote:
Mats wrote:The Asrock equivalent: CONROE945G-DVI.
One downside to this board is that if you overclock and use Standby (S3), when you return from standby the FSB resets to 266. Not such a big deal as it typically only overclocks to 299 anyway.

Well I've seen up to 340 MHz now.
Is that an issue that is common among other mobos? Never heard of it. Do you think it could be sloved with a new BIOS?

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Sat Oct 14, 2006 1:34 am

Mats wrote:
smilingcrow wrote:
Mats wrote:The Asrock equivalent: CONROE945G-DVI.
One downside to this board is that if you overclock and use Standby (S3), when you return from standby the FSB resets to 266. Not such a big deal as it typically only overclocks to 299 anyway.
Well I've seen up to 340 MHz now.
Is that an issue that is common among other mobos? Never heard of it. Do you think it could be sloved with a new BIOS?

From the horses mouth:

Dear Sir,

Thank you for contacting ASRock.
â€œSuspend to RAMâ€

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Sat Oct 14, 2006 7:07 am

Thanks SC. So maybe it's not the best choice for me, since I'd like to overclock and use S3.

I have some questions that you maybe can answer. The only thing I care about when it comes to performance is gaming. I don't care about RAR, XVID, Raytracing, or benchmarking. I've looked at reviews for some info, but it's so hard to find what I want to know. When graphics cards are tested they use realistic settings, but when CPU's are tested thy use something like 800 x 600 low quality settings in the games.

I know why of course, it's just to make as big difference between the CPU's as possible by making them the bottlenecks. But it doesn't reflect real world use...
My questions:

- I was thinking about getting a low end C2 together with 2 GB of RAM and a single 7900 GT/GTO or similar, I'd like to use pretty high resolution and settings. If I only care about gaming performance, is it really worth overclocking to 2.8 GHz or higher? I think that the graphics card becomes the bottleneck pretty much, but I'm not sure how much the overclock will affect...

- In a setup as above, but with an AMD X2 instead, would I see much lower performance? Most AMD vs. Intel tests uses Crossfire, which also tends to make the CPU more of a bottleneck..