Black mobo?

Auraomega · 26 Sep 2009 at 17:49

Hi there,

I'm soon to be building a new PC and I've decided if possible to build the entire machine with black PCBs, however I'm not really knowledgable about motherboards, so I'm not sure if there are even any black mobos in production anymore (they seem hard to come by), I'm not sure whether I'm going down the Core 2, i5 or i7 route yet, so suggestions for either types welcome. If possible I'd prefer SLI compatable as I have an nVidia card.

Overclocking ability, boot passwords and at least 1 IDE port are a must, other than that I'm not sure what I can gain for having one mobo over another. Price is also a concern, I'd like to keep the build below £700, £600 is desirable but £700 is my max, my build is currently £360.09, so with that I need to get a mobo, CPU and RAM; thats £239 - £339 ideally.

Auraomega · 26 Sep 2009 at 18:12

*Whistles loudly*

Well I'm building after Christmas, so all I can hope is that something drops in price by then, or I'm incredibly lucky and everything I want to buy is on offer

Oh, and I don't mind the connecters not being black (Just looking at the P55 boards), so long as the PCB is.

Auraomega · 26 Sep 2009 at 23:05

I just realised that P55 boards take DDR3, so RAM must also be taken into consideration (editing first post for new budget for mobo, cpu and RAM), which is starting to make the i5 route look very expensive...

Is there a considerable improvement with i5 over Core 2?

Auraomega · 27 Sep 2009 at 01:11

I'm not big on AMD.

I'm trying to build a gaming PC with at least enough power for me to play all current games, on high to full detail at 1680 x 1050, would be a bonus if it could most likely handle games for a few years to come. Obviously I'm also trying to save on money, but if the i5 does have some pretty big advantages over Core 2 then I may go for that as a fast PC is always good when you're a hobbiest developer (I hate waiting for code to compile).

The black isn't exactly a requirement, I'll always put use before looks, however I'm willing to spend a bit more here and there to get something that runs well and looks nice to boot.