CPU cooler clearance

Prob solved theres a place fotr a 50mm fan on the board, i take it that solves the air flow to the thermal armor prob, thanks everyone!!!

I just was reading that. It has a square removable cap for a fan if you go with liquid, or certain other HSF. make sure you get a quiet one though. small fans are usually high RPM and not known for silent operation. Just my opinion after reading about it in several places...but I think the plastic thermal shield is a bit of a gimmick and will trap/buildup more heat than it dissipates.
let us know how this build goes for you if you would. Good luck

Kind of mixed resposes on the thermal armour, some reviews say it helps, some say hinder. I like the look of it though. My Antec 900 gathers dust a lot! Any other P67 boards you can reccomend for £150, Keeping the current cooling choice in mind?

Im looking at the Asus P8P67 PRO Intel P67, anybody know if this would be a good choice of board paired with the Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz and Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 also Antec Kúhler H2O 620 CPU Watercooler? Also do i need to cool the mainboard also because im chosing a CPU watercooler?

I think the fan option is the saving grace for this one , it's a great quality/featured board. Did you notice it has a five year warranty? most others are running a 3 year. I wouldn't try to talk you out of it. if you have good case flow i would monitor the board temps for a while and see if you even need that 50mm fan. The only thing I have a concern about is the dust build up under the 'armor'. But i guess a blast of compressed air through the "shunts" can take care of that

If you go with Asus P8P67 PRO Intel P67, the case airflow will cool the board.

Yeh im getting. No point in over thinking it anymore. Hope the onboard sound is ok coz my sound cards fit a PCI port and i cant see one on the Sabertooth.

The saber, has a PCI!

I don't get the 200+ motherboards. Unless you are going for ultimate overclocks and need micro adjustments on voltages and timings then they really aren't worth it.

They don't OC better (by enough to make a real difference), they dont have more features (besides stuff like thermal armor to justify the higher price that dont really help much), they dont last longer (I rarely see boards go bad unless they have nvidia chipsets haha) and they dont run more stable. So what do they do?

I've used the Max3 and 4, the UD9 (built in a Level 10, not a GT, which wont fit any of the coolers you want btw, what crap for $850) and various other 250+ boards. I've yet to see why spend the money. IMO get a $150-160 mb, the 2600k (you will be glad you did later on) and I would check out the Mux-120 by thermalright. You should get everything you want.

Guy at work put together a P8P67 Pro (today) with a Corsair H50 and it does pretty good. But it not any better oc than the Mux-120 we tried and the Mux-120 has a lower max temp. I'm not a huge fan of sealed watercooling setups, the pumps tend to fail and guess what that means... Possibly dead MB when you realize it hasnt been cooling properly for days while you were on vacation. They dont perform better than high-end cooling (actually worse because of the size of the radiators, the 2x120 rads are much better but more expensive $130+ (i dont have the energy to convert to euro sorry man). Its just not worth the extra cash. If you spend that much you are better with a custom wc setup.

I don't want to put doubt in you and make you not want to purchase stuff. In the end it isn't going to matter as much what you choose if you pick quality parts and parts that fit. People that say different don't put this stuff together everyday. Prob put 3-4 maybe couple more system together and call it fact.

Nor do most other system builders. You're basically only getting some extra connectivity (if you need that much go with a workstation board and a add-in RAID card) and some larger heatsinks/heatpipes sitting over........nothing.

Having said that, the Sabertooth's 5-year warranty makes it more interesting- especially when it comes time to on sell. The board itself performance wise is good- but then, not many P67/Z68 boards aren't. What makes the Sabertooth a better proposition than most is that Asus haven't tried to go balls-out with the performance parameters -it's not specced for DDR3-2133+ (which is problematic for a lot of boards in any event), and the OC ability is middle of the pack.
What makes the boards appeal is that in some markets it is actually a cheap(ish) board -by P67 standards. Here, it retails for the same price as the Pro and the UD4 -the latter being a pretty average board- which makes the Sabertooth a good buy.

I'd agree with the MUX-120 cooler...except that it also is 160mm+ in height. Removing the side fan to accomodate it will almost certainly elevate GPU temps.

See the OC ability is what I question. I've been overclocking since the C300 days and I have rarely seen a motherboard magically give you and extra 100-200 mhz without going into unstable voltages etc. Anytime I've dealt with really high overclocks its not long before something goes wrong and it wont post and resets to safe mode or is no longer stable at said voltage/speed. It just doesnt seem worth it to squeeze that last 100mhz outta the processor. 98% of the time you will see your cpu fail before you motherboard will, unless you get to cherry pick from many. I've even done that but no matter what it seems like something always crops up over time with major oc's, I now prefer ultimate stability over a few hundred mhz. Its just not worth the time/energy. I cant count the nights I've been up all night tweaking/adjusting etc to get more out of the processor. In the end it just seems like luck if you get one of the mb/cpu combos that runs great at really high oc's.

Oh and the side fan can actually hurt temperatures if you have good front to back airflow. It causes turbulence which creates heat. It really depends on the case/setup. I have the 900 (gf's machine) and the front/back/top fans are plenty. It has so much airflow unless you are running SLI or xfire the side fan doesnt do much.

Well I for one like the fact that there is 200+ MB's available. It is a side effect of competition. When I look for a motherboard I look at as priorities

1) the correct capacities I need
2) Quality VRM/phasing
3) layout and functionality

lots of sub-catagories to that, but you get the idea.

For customer builds, I agree with you most of the time, but some of them are like me and fall into the "enthusiast" class and like the overkill over the top aspect, and are glad that some of this poor price to performance items exist. I will often pay twice as much for that last 10% of performance, just because I like this stuff.
I just rebuilt with a GA-990-FXA-UD7 in anticipation of the Bulldozer. I like getting the front line stuff and know going in that sometimes I am going to pay for it or get burned. It's a risk I have been willing to take, and don't ***** about it when I have gotten burned (see NB problem with the Asus Crosshair IV Formula)
I think this 'thermal armor" thing is a gimmick, but time will tell. and i think the heat-sink market in the air dept anyway is just coming up with ideas to make theirs look exotic rather than perform better. I just read a dreadful review on the new 'supercooler' Genesis...apparently not so good.
The biggest problem here, and places like these forums is that people that take an interest, and want to build for the first time, will spend a lot of money on the advice of the people here who respond. Too many people will defend their bad buying decisions and or insist that something is "the best" or "sucks" because thats the way they wish it was. It doesn't help for those who actually have a lot of experience 'hands on' with much of this product.
I like to think for the regulars though that if you frequent this place for a while , you can ferret out who to listen to. a good example is 'Dividebyzero' you can pretty much take what he says to the bank, and most here know that.

This is very true. Choice is what makes us human. You two both seem to be well informed but if we just took everything for fact then there would be no point of a discussion forum. There is very little fact in life, especially in computers. Wheres the fun without intelligent discussion

I agree completely...just don't like it when an OP spends a bunch of money when offered advice that is about as useful as a bumper sticker of Calvin pissing on a Ford emblem! ya know "intel sucks man!" LOL

Yeah thats kinda what I was feeling when I first came to this thread. I preach dont waste money but make sure you spend enough to get quality.

The other part I edited was:

The point being that if BD turns out to be a dud, I'm not going to whine about it.

You know AMD is going to a new socket shortly after BD which will allow BD to really shine. Its going out on AM3+ now so they can get something out. I don't think they can handle the cpu and chipset all at once.

Personally I'm done with AMD for now unless I want a budget computer (they rock for $100 or less). I don't see how BD will really be much faster than Thuban at release. I was an AMD guy until Core 2 wiped the floor with them.

Yeah it sounds like 6-9 months after BD with the 'Trinity ' release.

I'm a little more optimistic about AMD and the new architecture, but I will know in about 60 days.

well a new architecture, a shrink , and going from SOI to HKMG holds a lot of potential. The details of the architecture have been few, so I am just going to buy the first FX 8130p or 8150P and let'er rip.

I hope so. We need competition for Intel.

One guy posted in another thread " I hope Bulldozer rocks!....so I can afford a i72600k!"
:haha:

Kind of depends on what era/chipset you're talking about. For the most part, with so much of the conventional chipset now part of the CPU architecture it now comes down to the component tolerances. The biggest killer for OC stability is Vdroop in general terms- some boards are afflicted, some aren't. From my own experience (I build OC, watercooled and TEC systems more often than not, or overclock and mod for people who don't have the expertise, resources or time for repetetive stability testing) overclocking for 24/7 operation isn't about wringing out every last CPU cycle, it's about getting the best core freq at the lowest stable Vcore. Most people with a 2600K are more than happy with 4.5-4.7G on a daily basis, which for SNB is eminently do-able at a safe voltage (~1.35 or less...maybe a tad more on some CPU's if you need hyper threading)...maybe a couple of customers that wanted the epeen of 5G or more

High overclocks and instability go together hand-in-glove. Having said that, a thorough stability regime will lessen the chances of it happening quickly. So will preventative maintenance on the cooling system -including the systematic replacement of old TIM- and periodic stress testing. Anyone who thinks a substantial overclocked system is a "set-and-forget" proposition probably shouldn't be running one.

Of the systems I've built, I'd say that around a quarter (into three figures) were NF4, 680/780i and 790U + Conroe/Kentsfield CPU. Virtually all would hold a stable OC better than what ever else was around at the time ( Asus Commando/Blitz/Rampage, Giga DS5/DQ6, various Abit, DFI flavours), and with the possible exception of a couple of X6800's I would say the board's capacitors, or tension in the northbridge heatsinks gave way before the CPU started to throw errors. Luck of the draw maybe, but I get called to RMA/replace boards much more frequently than CPU's - and most of the CPU's that die tend to be because of external problems (static, incorrect handling).

Precisely the market the Sabertooth is aimed at

Such as it always was, probably as it always will be. There are no end of threads devoted to the overclock potential of certain Sandy Bridge FPO batchs. For every tired ex-overclocker there is probably one budding tweaker in the making- albeit with a better CPU arch to work with, but less manual overclocking voltage parameters to work with. Having said that, I don't think this thread is about finding the golden chip that can hit the 57 multi

That's actually a sentiment I've run into a number of times when discussing upcoming builds with prospective customers. They value the performance of Bulldozer as a means to make Intel lower it's prices, and not for what BD might bring to the table. A seemingly odd view, but on questioning these people it comes down to seeing AMD as the red-headed stepchild of the manufacturers family. I point out that an AMD chipset usually offers more connectivity than a compareably priced Intel board, but it seems that AMD's past woes ( read southbridge I/O performance), BD release passing into Duke Nukem territory, and at least locally -pricing of FX chipset boards, doesn't make an attractive proposition.
Add in that Intel supplies AMD with a superior GbLAN over the generic Realtek (and others) for their boards, and I think the general perception is that AMD are doing a P1ss poor job of playing follow the leader. A very hard attitude to shake.