Building new rig, which motherboard?

[Stern]

I'm looking for advice on what motherboard to get. I've pretty much decided on a CPU, I'm getting the Core 2 Duo 8500. I was thinking about getting some pretty decent DDR2 ram, about 4 GB if I decide to go for Vista (and I probably will).

I don't know about a graphics card yet, but I am leaning towards Nvidia as the last card I got was a 8800 GTS 320MB and it served me very well in all of the games I played. A recommendation on graphics card would not go amiss either. I would like to upgrade my system at some point, possibly with SLI (since I'm leaning towrads Nvidia), so unless you guys think that SLI isn't worth it (if I get a decent enough card to begin with), I will be looking for an SLI board.

So basically, DDR2, LGA 775, and SLI (or CF if ATI is supposed to be better?)

Not too pricey, I'm not looking to overclock (only a little possibly), so I don't really need fancy features. I just want something very reliable, as I've had bad experiences with motherboards in the past. Oh, and more than 4 USB slots... I have a lot of external devices. But if you guys can at least recommend a good chipset I can look up boards for those chipsets myself and then come back here with my choices for final decisions.

Thanks,

Stern

 

[o1die]

I use 2 asrock boards, the p45 ts-r and g43 fullhd. Asrock has good value, and plenty of sata ports and memory slots; many boards have ddr2 and ddr3 slots.

 

[sonnygdude]

I've been really pleased with the ASUS P5Q series. Great and robust mobo, lots of ports, and the Expressgate feature is pretty handy in my opinion. The vanilla P5Q has the power connector in a bit of a weird place, but the P5Q Pro might be just what you're looking for

Edit: It's a P45 chipset so it won't do SLI and in Crossfire it'll only have a 8x link, but unless you're gaming at 2560 x whatever you won't notice it. Get an HD4870x2 and you can bypass the crossfire setup

 

[Stern]

Is there anywhere that I can easily look at all the differences between the P5Q boards? There seem to be a lot of variations. Also, I really would prefer to get an SLI capable one because right now it seems graphics cards are still the bottleneck so one Nvidia card now and one in a year sounds like a decent upgrade to me.

Are there any good SLI ones?

Thanks for the suggestions so far!

 

[BonzaiDuck]

How much did you want to spend? Do you want to use DDR3 RAM, or stick with DDR2?

I'm not going to stake any change on it, although the trail-signs look good. Maximum PC gave a "Kickass 9" to the Striker II Extreme. But it is way too pricey -- almost unreasonable. I believe it requires DDR3.

There is a Striker II Formula which is a DDR2, 780i board. Also -- the price tag, again, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, and I suspect that's even before people buy it. I certainly haven't got the change for it right now -- or for that matter, the abovementioned DDR3 board. The Extreme 790i board got a rave notice from Tom's Hardware, so there's either double-payola and hype at work, or the reviews substantiate the claims.

I'm playing around at the moment with an eVGA 132-CK-NF78-A1 780i board. After the rebate, you can get it for $219. But it seems to have shortcomings over fan control. This may be a BIOS issue, which can be fixed with a revision.

But the skinny on the street suggests that the 132-YW-E178-A1 is worth the money, and frankly, I made a mistake not choosing it over the NF78-A1 board. The YW has 8-cycle voltage regulation and solid-state capacitors; the NF78 has 6-cycle regulation and regular caps. And the price difference is between $20 and $40, I think.

Apparently XFX makes the same boards, and these are eVGA knockoffs. I need to look into that further.

I can say that the NF78 -- and therefore the YW-E178 -- are great over-clockers. At least eVGA paid attention to chipset cooling, but there were rumors that some board shipped with bad contact between the heatpipe-necklace and the Northbridge. I advised one fellow the other day to RMA his board, because it was reporting all sorts of problems with memory and hard disks, and his Southbridge temperature was something like 65C at idle.

On the board I got, you can load it up with PRIME95 or IntelBurnTest, and the MCP temperatures never exceed 48C.

I'd say for either SLI, over-clocking, or a combination of both, it is worth it to do a better search than I've done, read as many reviews as you can, check some user forums, and "separate the men from the boys" per the depth and integrity of the benchtest reviews, as well as the high praise and sour notes coming from customer reviews and forum posts.

There are a lot of reasons to pick a motherboard, depending on how well you plan the entire project. I actually chose my old Striker Extreme 680i not just for certain Cadillac features, but for the placement and number of PCI_E slots, and whether at least two of them were x16 for the bandwidth. People will tell you about the troubles they had with the reference-board models, or they will say there were "FSB holes" in the Striker board -- which was exempt from problems common to the reference-board models. But the board also took you through several generations of chips ending in the Penryn Wolfdales.

My guess, though, is that you're probably searching for a 780i or 750i motherboard.

 

[Stern]

Ok I've looked around and I think I've chosen my memory now aswell, G.Skill DDR2-800 2x2GB (or possibly DDR2-1000). Anyone ever used a E8500 with G.Skill Ram and on which motherboard?

I don't plan on overclocking, if I do it won't be much so if a motherboard I buy is only better than a cheaper one because of its overclocking features I'd rather go for the cheaper one.

Thanks for the suggestions so far!

 

[Stern]

I don't think I'd go over $200 by the way. Unless its super duper awesome and must-have and will save me money by not having to upgrade a while or something

 

[Stern]

Does anyone have a good link to a comparison chart or table between current chipsets for Intel motherboards? Preferably only DDR2 and SLI but I need to see what is the best now, what is mid-range now, so I can decide. Right now I just can't

 

[sonnygdude]

i think the problem here is that you can't run SLI on Intel chipset motherboards, except for skulltrail. If you're truly set on SLI you'll need to get an Nvidia chipset board.

In reference to your earlier question, I am using G.Skill RAM with an E8500 on a P5Q Deluxe, it is performing wonderfully so far, absolutely no complaints.

I still think the P5Q pro and a good single card like an HD4870, GTX260, or even an HD4870x2 if you're gaming at 2560x1600 might be a really good solution for you. But with the P5Q Pro you could always go crossfire if you're set on a multi-card solution

 

[Shmee]

so you say you want sli possibly?

well, I myself have owned 2 sli mobos, the xfx 680i LT and recently got an EVGA 780i FTW. the 780i, either edition, should be a good board, though it might be a bit pricey for you. so I would recomend the evga 750i FTW. oc's well, supports SLI, has other cool features.

 

[Stern]

I'm definitely looking at either the EVGA 750i FTW or the P5Q Pro/Deluxe now. Still to decide on the graphics card, so over to the graphics forums for me!

 

[PeanutButter]

I'm pretty much torn between the P5Q series and evga 750i right now as well. If you're set on going SLI, possibly 2 880gt/9800gt's or 9800gtx/+'s are your cheapest bet with great performance. Decidding between those boards is pretty much between SLI, possibly better overclockability with Intel chipsets, maybe customer service (Asus highly lacks in this department). Both of the boards are pretty solid from what I've been reading. Good luck.

 

[Stern]

Yeah I've pretty much dumped the idea of getting SLI at this point though. Not enough extra performance for the extra price, heat, etc. I'm just going to go with a single 4870 1GB or something so it doesn't matter which of these two I get. Whichever features I like most when I goto Newegg for buying I suppose. Good luck with your build, too!