Utterly confused by boards - recommendations needed!

TheBigCheese

TheBigCheese

TheBigCheese

Soldato
Joined
6 Sep 2005
Posts
3,781
Hi guys

I'm building a second PC using Intel for the first time...I've spent a good while browsing these forums and I seem to be hitting errors after errors...

Some 680i(?) boards that are supposed to be really good have SATA errors...

Some Gigabyte boards have serious issues

975 chipsets are better than 945 for Duo chips....

I'm lost with it all...please recommend me something you knowledgeable chaps!

I have chosen so far...

Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB)

Corsair (TWIN2X2048-6400) XMS2-6400 2048MB 5-5-5-12 2X240 DIMM Black XMS2 Heat Spreader

Motherboard...
I need a good reliable board with quite a lot of ports on it (see below)...and the crucial thing (if possible), I would like quad core support as it seems the quad cores will be dropping in price in Q2 2007.

NVIDIA board as I am using my existing 6800GT graphics card as it will be for Photoshop and video encoding mainly.

I would like to upgrade to an 8800GTX (or the latest at the time) eventually.

I have 4 SATA HDDs, one IDE HDD and two IDE DVD-RWs at the moment.

I also use all 10 USB2 ports in my current board (A8N-32SLI) so it would need plenty of connectivity in that respect.


If I could have some recommendations on board that would be brilliant, I'd like all the parts delivered by Christmas so I can build it over those days.

Thanks! :)
 
the problem is probably going to be if you want to continue using 3 PATA devices as most new mobos only have 1 PATA channel (so 2 devices).
Of course you could always use a PATA to SATA adapter but the nVidia 650i chipset (boards just starting to appear e.g. Asus P5N-E SLI) supports 2 PATA channels.
 
Hi, thanks for the reply.

I'll sacrifice an IDE channel if I have to, SLI isn't something I really need on this machine.

I do have another question about it though...

Looking at these Intel boards I can't see where it says Nvidia or ATI...PCI-E is just straight PCI-E is it?
It doesn't matter unless the board specifically states that it is a SLI or Crossfire board?

Which is the generally better board to go for between the:
Abit AB9 Pro
Asus P5B Deluxe

Thanks for any help you can offer! :)
 
PCI-E is straight PCI-E but e.g. the nVidia SLI gfx driver checks for an nVidia chipset & SLI is only officially supported on nVidia chipsets.
Intel 965P & 975X chipsets can run ATi Crossfire if the board can take 2 gfx cards (not all 965s can).

Probably the P5B DeLuxe (certainly for overclocking).
As for quad core it looks like Intel has tightened the specs after the fact again so a no. of mfrs are releasing updated versions of existing boards ...
 
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