ASUS P5B Deluxe or some other 680i boards

[aatf510]

Hi, sorry I am a little off track because I haven't been following hardware releases for almost 1 year, and I am still stuck in the A64 era.

Anyway, my friend is looking to do a E6600 w/ watercooling setup, and the first mobo that come to my mind is the ASUS P5W DH. It's probably THE BOARD OF 2006. However, it is currently late March 2007, and this is a fairly old product.

Are there any other recommendations like a 680i/650i board that he should be getting? Or should he just spend $200 on the ASUS P5B Deluxe??

Also, I still haven't got this straight. Does the memory actually run at PC2 8000 (DDR2 1000) speed by default (meaning no overclocking?) or are those memory just for overclocking use? What would be some decent memory to pair up with a overclocked E6600. Thanks!

 

[aatf510]

Anyone?

 

[RonAKA]

The Asus P5B DX is a good board. You should also look at the Gigabyte DS3. This may be common with all boards but I don't really like the way the P5B BIOS handles the memory speed. If you want your memory to run slower all you can do is manually set say DDR2-800 ram to say it is DDR2-667, or 533. These can be large steps and either force you to significantly overclock or underclock the memory. Perhaps there are other boards which allow smaller steps by just setting a multiplier instead of specifying ram speed.

To my knowledge DDR2-800 is the current max, but you can overclock past that. Kingston offer some (Hyperion-X?) that is rated higher, but I believe is just 800 that has the official blessing to overclock. If you want max speed it is worth getting good ram, as ram can be your limit in OC.

Also consider that the processor may not be the limit if your objective is gaming. For the performance/$$ decision you may be better off with an E4300 and use the saved $$ on a better graphics card, to get an overall better gamer.