Advice on 775 motherboard

[FriedCPU]

Hi,
I am hoping somebody can give me some advice on what motherboard to get once I tell you my requirements, I havn't build a machine in 3 years (amd 64 3200+, getting abit old now) so am not really sure what is best.

I am after a motherboard capable of

-E6600 cpu
-1066fsb or more
-1066 speed ram (i believe this is ddr2-8500, although I cannot be sure, what are the tradeoffs against ddr2-800?)
-ati crossfire (i intend to upgrade in the future to this)
-SATA II in raid5 (atleast 6 sata ports, would prefer 8 or more though)

this will be a storage / video editing and encoding box, with some gaming (hl2, cod2, ut2k4, none of the new stuff really, although from what I have read the e6600 can handle it)

I have found a few boards that meet some of this specification, mainly they fail on the speed of the memory, is 1066 memory to match the fsb that important? I am told it
can bring quite an increase in performance.

** edit **
I have been looking at the Abit AW9D-MAX
i was almost sold, but after grabbing the manual from the abit website, I was informed that only 4 of the 7 sata ports are able todo raid 5, the others are 0,1 or JBOD, which sucks pretty much,

If/when I find a board that has enough connections that can do raid5, I hope to have 6 or more 750gb drives, for total storage of 3.5tb - 4.2tb (700gb of each drive usable and the 1 drive for parity taken off.)

Maybe I am jus tasking too much, i hope not though
** </edit> **

Any help anybody can give would be greatly appriciated.

- FriedCPU.

 

[moosey]

For the memory, you don't need DDR2-1066. DDR2 1066 is 1066/2=FSB of 533. To run an e6600 at stock, you need RAM that'll do FSB of 266mhz which is DDR2-533. So don't overspend for DDR2-1066, especially if you're not overclocking. If you're overclocking, DDR2-800 would be a nice choice for the e6600.

For Crossfire, you're pretty much stuck on the Intel 975x boards. The Abit you looked at seems pretty good. Two others that come to mind are the Intel D975XBX2 (Bad Axe 2) and the Asus P5W-DH.

Any reason you're choosing Crossfire over SLI? Do you really need either of them for what you're doing?(I don't know much about the video work you're doing) If not, your board options will open up a bit.