Mobo choice !

PwnDirect

PwnDirect

PwnDirect

Associate
Joined
25 Sep 2008
Posts
1,591
Location
In My Head
Ive been looking around for a matx mobo for some time & it appears to be a utter minefield.

All am looking for :

Pci 2 support
Decent Oc options nothing crazy
And not having a long list of issues.
Ohh and not using nividea chipset :p

The g43/45 appears riddled with problems

The gigabytes don’t have pci 2 support for some reason & the Asus P5Q-EM doesn’t oc well & has issues when using non integrated graphics.

Am going to be using an 8400 & a 4850 but would like the option to upgrade to a quad next year when prices come down & more games will support quad core.

At present am considering the AMD :eek: route to avoid the above mentioned issues
with a 780g chipset & a Phenom 9750. The performance is only slightly less than the 8400 & yes it’s a quad but comparing AMD to Intel is chalk & cheese.

So what would everyone else choice be a gaming build?
 
I'm in a very similar situation.

Curunen said:
Anyway, I'm quite unsure on getting the gigabyte ds2r. No doubt it's great, but it's a little old and I'd like to go for one of the newer g45/g43 boards.
Trouble is, I keep reading nothing but bad reviews about them.
I've looked at the DFI lanparty jr p45, but one- I will not be using crossfire, two- the bios offer far more than I will be needing (I'm not looking to push components to the max, just a healthy overclock for a little more performance), and three- it's expensive (though I can stretch that far, I'd prefer not to).
The intel DG45ID has a nice layout, but from the reviews it is heavily limited in bios, as well as a few other niggles (which I can't remember off the top of my head).
Which leaves four asus boards:
p5q-em (g45)
p5q-vm (g45)
p5ql-em (g43)
p5ql-cm (g43)

As far as I know, the only difference between the p5q-em and vm is the em has an hdmi interface (which doesn't really matter as I will be using a dedicated video card anyway).
The p5ql-em has my favourite layout of the four- angled sata ports, and an esata port on the rear, as well as a better looking northbridge heatsink. The problem here is I can't find much user feedback on it anywhere.
Out of the p5ql-em and p5ql-cm, I prefer the em, as the cm only has displayport instead of hdmi, but with no esata or internal angled sata ports, and only 2 ram slots! The cm does have 2 pci slots, whereas the em has 2 pcie x1 slots.

It's strange that the g43 p5ql-em seems to have better features than the g45 p5q-em.
Click to expand...

Tbh, for me it's either the P5Q-EM or the P5QL-EM, and I'm leaning towards the latter (with the hope that things will improve as Asus work on the bios).
This thread has what little info on the board I can find through google. The same person talks about it here as well.

Hope this helps. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom