Best mobo available for my needs?

Mint_Sauce · 17 Sep 2007 at 20:32

I've been looking at all the boards but i'm not sure what to go with, hoping someone here who's in to mobos would be able to give me some pointers of what to avoid or look out for.

I'm looking to spec up a beast machine for editing huge images, I'll be needing RAID etc. What's the best mobo out there for RAID and general features? I'll be overclocking it too with a cpu which I haven't decided on yet.

Any suggestions? Is it worth going for the new X38 boards or better sticking with current more matured boards?

Teaf · 17 Sep 2007 at 20:57

Mint_Sauce said:
Any suggestions? Is it worth going for the new X38 boards or better sticking with current more matured boards?

You could take a gamble, but I would wait a couple of more weeks until the reviews come out and more than just the Gigabyte DQ6 board so you can see how they perform. Although early results show that the X38 is better than the P35 (based on Anandtech's X35-DQ6 vs. IP35 Pro comparison). I'm seriously leaning towards buying a X38 myself to upgrade from my 965P-S3, as even though it carries a higher cost I just love it's features and futureproofing. Plus, I've heard that X38's have much better RAM performance and also will produce better results with Penryn chips due to the chipset, but that unfortunately is just a rumour at the moment.

If you wanted a known mature board, that is already a proven performer then I would say you have 3 to choose from:

Abit IP35 Pro
Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6
Asus P5K Deluxe

All of them have their benefits, and all have their downfalls. Asus has WiFi but high power consumption, Abit IP35 Pro has funky things like CMOS reset on the back of the board, but fails to support PC2-4200 DDR and has it's LAN over the PCI lanes which caps the transfer rates, and the Gigabyte board is kinda half and half in a sense that it has things like low power consumption but doesn't include nice things like WiFi or CMOS reset switches but is a very solid board with extremely good quality bits. All of these boards also use an ICH9R southbridge, therefore you have built in Raid via the Intel ports.

Mint_Sauce · 17 Sep 2007 at 20:59

Thanks flibby, great information - exactly what I needed!

Might wait a few weeks then, i'll have a look in to the boards you mentioned and then make a decision, always something else to wait for when building a pc though. If it's not mobos, it's CPUs or graphics cards. :S

Teaf · 17 Sep 2007 at 21:03

Mint_Sauce said:
Might wait a few weeks then, i'll have a look in to the boards you mentioned and then make a decision, always something else to wait for when building a pc though. If it's not mobos, it's CPUs or graphics cards. :S

Heh, I hear that. Was fully set myself on getting an Abit IP35 Pro after about 3 weeks of looking over reviews / previews / forums and so forth, then I realised I could afford an X38 and now I'm doing the same again for that

Worse than buying a house!

Mint_Sauce · 17 Sep 2007 at 21:29

Yeah, I bet after waiting for the X38 boards, Nvidia will announce a new 4gb 9900 GTXXX graphics card to come out 4 weeks later and i'll be sitting about for months.

BUFF · 18 Sep 2007 at 01:41

flibby said:
Abit IP35 Pro has funky things like CMOS reset on the back of the board, but fails to support PC2-4200 DDR and has it's LAN over the PCI lanes which caps the transfer rates,

P35 chipset as a whole doesn't support PC4200 (& I'll be surprised if X38 does).
& the PCI Gb is true but isn't a problem for imo 99% of users as it's still waaay faster than domestic broadband & faster than a single 7200rpm HDD can handle.

Mint_Sauce · 20 Sep 2007 at 15:15

I would be looking in the future to build an external RAID stack over gigabit ethernet, would the IP35 have problems with the speed?

Teaf · 20 Sep 2007 at 15:21

Mint_Sauce said:
I would be looking in the future to build an external RAID stack over gigabit ethernet, would the IP35 have problems with the speed?

A little yes. Due to Abit running the LAN over the PCI lanes you will take a hit in speed, as per the picture below:

Techspot said:
The ASUS P5K Deluxe and Abit IP35 Pro are the only two motherboards to feature dual Gigabit LAN controllers while the rest offer a single Gigabit LAN connection. As you can see due to the fact that the Abit IP35 Pro uses the PCI bus for its LAN controllers the maximum speed has been capped. The second LAN controller on the ASUS P5K Deluxe also uses the PCI bus and therefore was a bit slower than the first controller which runs on the PCI Express bus.

Asus (kind of...) and Gigabyte never did that however, and if you were to consider that to be a decisive point in buying a new motherboard I would look at P5K or the P35C-DQ6. Those are the higher boards though, and you get away with the middle range boards like the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P which does include 2x PCI-E slots which will house a RAID card if you went that route (although I am not sure if using a RAID card in the IP35 Pro would hamper the speeds of the card, I'm assuming not - but that wasn't you initial intention I don't think), and also don't limit their LAN by putting it through the PCI lanes and instead take it through the PCI-E.

Mint_Sauce · 20 Sep 2007 at 15:42

Thanks, very interesting. I'm not sure what to go with now, hehe.

kevpuk · 20 Sep 2007 at 15:43

Close your eyes and use a pin ?

Mint_Sauce · 20 Sep 2007 at 16:08

P5K Deluxe i'm edging towards. Anything this one misses that the others have?

BUFF · 21 Sep 2007 at 11:10

Mint_Sauce said:
I would be looking in the future to build an external RAID stack over gigabit ethernet, would the IP35 have problems with the speed?

is there not an eSATA solution as that should be faster still than gigabit ethernet (which could still run into transfer rate capping depending upon your RAID setup)?