Going crazy looking for P35 mobo >:(

[LMarsh]

I?m trying to put together a Q6600 computer, but I can?t pick a motherboard. Every time I find a board I can use it turns out something?s wrong with it! I hope someone can help me before I have to be committed!

I?m looking for a board that:
- has the P35 chipset
- is known to be stable and reliable and doesn?t have bugs or annyoing issues etc.
- is made of quality material, has good LAN and audio - not a ?discount?/ low-end board
- has 3 PCI-slots (old fashioned PCI)
- has at least 1 PCIe x1 slot
- can fit a Geforce 8800 GTS video card (the 320 MB RAM version) without having it block too many of the other slots, ports etc. As a minimum I?d like two PCI slots and one PCIe x1 slot free.

I don?t really need:
- overclocking features
- SLI or crossfire
- RAID
- a gazillion sata hdds (four free ones would be okay)
- dual lan
- wifi
- ddr3
- firewire or esata

I won?t mind having to pay a little extra for a mobo with some of the features that I don?t need. The main thing is that the board is good quality, stable, without bugs, and can fit the GF8800.

I?ve considered a lot of different boards, but I haven?t found any that I?m sure will meet my requirements. So I hope someone has some suggestions.

Thanks for reading.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Abit IP35-E at MWAVE. $70 AR. The double post issue has been fixed with 13 Beta BIOS. Board is good up to 500MHz FSB. Read my review in this forum. The bay below the PCI-E x16 is un-used.

 

[postmortemIA]

My intel DP35DP meets all but 3 PCI slots.. two are useful. And it is probably more stable than overclocking boards.

Beside, it is only one with quality LAN (intel gigabit) and sound (SigmaTel)... rest of boards use Realtek stuff.

 

[gingerstewart55]

Originally posted by: postmortemIA
My intel DP35DP meets all but 3 PCI slots.. two are useful. And it is probably more stable than overclocking boards.

Beside, it is only one with quality LAN (intel gigabit) and sound (SigmaTel)... rest of boards use Realtek stuff.

Second this suggestion. If you're not looking to OC your cpu, then the Intel-built motherboard would most likely be your best bet for stability and build quality. If there's one thing Intel does right with their boards, it's that they are ultra stable and very high quality...if unexciting.

 

[LR6]

postmortemIA,

How do you like your DP35DP? I just want a stable, non-overclocked system and this board seems perfect, but I have been looking at this board and have read several conflicting reports on it. I currently have a old D845pebt2 and I love it.

A lot of users seem to be having problems with the memory or high ICH temps. I think that most of the people with memory problems are using high performance ram that requires more than the standard 1.8v supply, but one user somewhere said that he still had problems with the specified memory, so I don't know what to think, bit I do find it odd that they performed WHQL testing with DDR667. This board also seems to gets generally bad reviews on NewEgg.

I now looking at the GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3P Rev 2.0 it has firewire and about every other feature that I would like, but it it a bit more expensive.

 

[postmortemIA]

Some of bad responses were just pure user ignorance: enabling AHCI and not installing drivers during Windows XP setup is user issue.

MCH and ICH temps are high by design, it is their OK range if they are in 70s degrees- so the intel desktop utility says- green range is up to 90 degrees. No problems here dure to temperatures.

No board is stellar, but for non-oc purpose and desired long life span- this is the choice worth considering.

Overall, I have no issues whatsoever with board or system itself, it works just fine on XP, Vista 32 and 64, and Suse 10.2.

 

[LMarsh]

Thanks for the replies.

SerpentRoyal, I?m glad you pointed out that the IP35-E has an unused bay below PCIe x16. That is very useful. (I can?t understand why there aren?t more boards like this.)

PostmortemIA and Gingerstewart55, the DP35DP was at the top of my list, until I read this thread on a forum where someone described some problems he had with the board, possibly because of IRQ conflicts between his sound card and his video card or some other component. (More specifically, his sound card was making crackling noises. It was a forum about music recording, which I?m also going to be using my computer for.)

From what I gathered from his posts all the PCI slots shared ressources with something, and it was not possible to manually set IRQs. To be honest I don?t have a full understanding of what exactly this entails. But I have a feeling that the sharing of IRQs is something that may make the sharing components perform less well, and could cause me similar problems to the one described, problems that might then be unsolvable, if I couldn?t manually assign an IRQ?

As you can probably tell I?m a complete noob when it comes to hardware, so it would be great if someone could enlighten me about the hmm... ramifications of this - maybe I?m blowing the problem out of proportion?