Tax return decision to pair Phenom II x4 940BE

[stopthekilling77]

So I just did my taxes and I'm not getting a ton back, but with what I have, i want to upgrade my system as best I can. That being said, my options were to upgrade to the best processor my current board could take which would have been the Q6600 or upgrade the board and processor going the route of the faster, unlocked Black Edition x4 940. With it being only a few dollars more than the Q6600, I'm inclined to go that route.

The deal is that I'm staying with my 6GB of DDR2 800 running at 1000MHz so I'll be purchasing a good AM2+ board. Problem is that I'm not sure what chipset flavor is the best. I'll be dual booting 64-bit Ubuntu 8.10 and Vista Ultimate 64-bit. So from here I just need to get the lowdown on those chipsets! Thanks!

[XstollieX]

I have the 790gx board from gigabyte and I dig it. It's paired with the p2 940 and its smokin'. I was able to bump up the chip to 3.6 for benching buy upping the multiplier to 18 from 15 and a voltage bump to up .025. This was done on stock cooling. I am confident I could hit 4ghz+ with my water cooling. I just need to figure what to do about a video card. The system It will be replacing is a e8400 @ 3.6 with 9800gtx x2 in sli. If you are only going to run a single card I would recommend this board. It will support 2 pcie, but they will run at 8x each. If running dual cards I would suggest a 790fx board. I believe it will have both cards at 16x. I will see if I have any screen shots of the benches.

[stopthekilling77]

Well I've looked a bit, and I'm really liking Gigabyte's $114.99 GA-MA790X-UD4 board
All but one review on Newegg are very positive, and the one negative comment was from a watercooling enthusiast bummed that the northbridge cooling was getting in the way of him putting it under water.

$229.00 for the x4 940 BE
+114.99 for this motherboard
---------
$343.99 for a major system upgrade. not bad... now to sell the Xbox 360, my school books, and wait for my tax return...

[XstollieX]

Sorry it has taken me to get some benchmarks for you like I said I would. So here they are. After the first one I decided not to run the gpu tests. I figured that was a waste of time since thats not what your looking at.

[stopthekilling77]

Thanks XstollieX! Still ramped up about the purchase, I can't wait to get the tax return! I haven't run Vantage on here yet, but I will before and after the big install to see how my E6750 fares at 2.96GHz against the 940BE... I just can't shake that "i'm getting an unlocked quad-core stock at 3GHz for how much??" feeling

[XstollieX]

Ill post shots of my e8400 @3.6 tommorrow it only hit ~7500 I thought it would be more

[stopthekilling77]

What kind of temps are you getting on the 940BE?