Have a few 775/E4300 + IDE drive questions.

Mikharper

Mikharper

Mikharper

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Last year I bought the ASrock mobo that could do both DDR1/2 AGP/PCI-E and a while ago it died. Now that things have moved on a bit I would like to get a different motherboard and new DDR2 memory.

I have the following

E4300 (Stock cooler but willing to OC, gladly infact)
520W PSU
7800GTX 256mb PCI-E
2xIDE HDDs
2xDVDRWs

So in a nutshell,

Cheapish but good motherboard to go with the E4300 (that will also run 2xIDE HDDs) + cheapish but good 2/4gig (I run xp)

Thanks in advance.
 
Having that many IDE devices really limits you, in fact I think only the Nforce 650i based motherboards offer 2x IDE slots. The Asus P5N-E SLi is a decent option but I can't get the Asus website to play along nicely enough to check that it does definitely support 2x IDE slots at the moment.

As for Ram, it depends on your budget - for 2gb I'd pick Geil PC6400 C4 probably, for 4gb I'd go with G.Skill PC6400.

There is another option for the IDE drives, pick up a cheap IDE controller card for about £10-15 and accept that you would be better upgrading sooner rather than later. It would certainly open up more options on the motherboard front.
 
Thanks SPW, after looking round I see you're right and I'm limiting myself.

I'm now open to putting my HDDs in an old comp, getting everything I want off them and getting a new HDD if that would help on the overall better motherboard front.

So, forgetting IDE requirments at the moment, do you have an idea of what motherboards I should be looking at?
 
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Are the dvdrw's IDE or SATA?

If only the HDD's are IDE you would only need 1 IDE connector as they support 2 devices.

If the DVDRW's are IDE, see above post :)
 
Cheap but good overclocking immediately says to me Gigabyte P31 DS3L, however it is a pretty basic motherboard - no Raid, no Crossfire, no fancy features just solid performance and only 4x SATA ports.

If you've got a little bit more cash to spend then the Abit IP35-E offers a more fully featured chipset but probably only about the same level of overclockability.
 
Thanks SPW, I'll check out the suggestions and go from there, I see 80gb SATA = £20/25 so I dont mind having windows on that.
 
i know this isnt really what your looking for but i am running this motherboard (i know its matx but im using it in a atx case with a decent hardware) and everything has been running fine for about 8 months. I use 2 dvd rw drivers (ide) and a hdd (also ide) so im pretty sure there must be a mobo with 2 slots somewhere even if its just until you get a new dvd drive or hdd.
http://www.msicomputer.co.uk/index.php?func=proddesc&prod_no=1123&maincat_no=1&cat2_no=170
overclocks okay though its not really a overclocking board like those above. all my specs are in sig. dont flame me about it . as i was on a tight budget when i did this build . only way i can fault it is the position of the P4 connecter and 24pin atx power connector
 
Right, thinking of going for:

Abit IP35-E

and 4gig of DDR2 - any reason to not go for the OCZ on offer over the G.Skill Semi-Pro Waster recommended?
 
Unless it has changed recently the OCZ Ram requires 2.1v to boot and the motherboard supplies 1.8v by default so it is a bit hit and miss whether you'll have problems getting it to boot initially so you can change the voltages.

I'm not sure if the Asus P5K SE shares the same default voltages or not but it is the same prices and worth investigating.
 
The Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Intel P35 at just under £66 is a cracking board.

If you are getting 4GB of ram i take it you have XP or Vista 64 bit versions? If you only have the 32 bit versions then they will not be able to use all the memory. You could save £15 on the memory by going for the OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 Dual Channel Vista Gold Series DDR2 (OCZ2G8004GK) kit. If you only have a 32bit OS then there's no reason to go more expensive than the OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel Platinum Revision 2 XTC Series DDR2 (OCZ2P800R22GK) kit.

For a graphics card the OcUK GeForce 8800 GT 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/DVI (PCI-Express) at just over £110 is an absolute steal.

Your E4300 should clock nicely with a decent cooler on it. An Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro should do the job nicely. I have a E4300 that does 3.4Ghz on water cooling. Yours should hit 3Ghz easy enough on air.
 
pastymuncher while it is true you won't be able to use all 4gb of Ram under a 32bit OS you can still use ~3.5gb depending on the size of the graphics cards Ram which is none too shabby an amount so I think it could still be worth it.
 
Right thanks guys, Gone for:

G.Skill 4GB DDR2 PQ PC2-6400C5 (2x2GB) CAS5 Dual Channel Kit (F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ)
Abit IP35-E (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

Thanks for the suggestion of the cooler, I'll see how it goes with the stock first :)
 
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