Quote Originally Posted by zsero View Post
Can I ask you to tell me some unbiased opinion about which would you think would be more stable today, a i7 920 D0 in a EX58-UD5 or a Q9650 in a EP45-UD3P?

For me, performance is not _that_ important, I would like to have a quiet and stable overclock for 24/7 usage, in the 3.6-4 Ghz range. Like how I am using my Q6600 @ 3.6 Ghz for more than a year now. Setting it up once and from that time no tweaking, not spending nights looking for more voltages, just a quiet, stable overclock for everyday work. The cooler would be a TRUE with a Scythe fan on it, for the i7 system I would need to buy more expensive RAMs and everything would be a bit more complicated, but if you say it's as stable as a UD3P could be than I would go for it.

What scares me most is that I still read about serious BIOS bugs, like no PWM no sleep, etc. I think those things are really smoothed out in the latest generation P45 boards.
I came from a Q6600 and an Asus P5Q-e to my current setup and found overclocking to 3.6 a piece of cake. Solid and stable with decent temps (also on a TRUE). As OC'ing is down to individual components, as much messing about is required to find the best setting on any piece of kit so really the decision should be based on whether you want to go i7, affordability and availability rather than how easy it is to get a stable clock.

Also, a 920 @ 3.2 is likely to match a 9650 @ 3.8 so you would'nt have to work as hard to get the same performance :P