Mobo must & nice-to-haves these days?

[Jim Bancroft]

Hi guys,

I'm thinking about a new mobo and CPU, as I last bought in Feb 2005. Back then I got an MSI Socket 939 board and an Athlon 64 3000. So, not bad but not an overclocker's dream. Haven't touched the setup since.

I'm looking for similar performance this time through. I figure $120 for the mobo and $120 for the chip. I'm not wedded to AMD but I'm more familiar with them.

What are the big changes since early 2005? Obviously a multicore chip is a must, but when it comes to the motherboards, what do I want? I have DDR 400 ram currently; what is the standard today?

As far as top manufacturers, is it still the same players-- MSI, Abit, ASUS, Gigabyte, DFI, with FoxConn and others leading the value end? I'll pay more for a board without all the bells and whistles, as long as it's rock-solid in design and drivers & support. Last thing I want is to have to replace the board in a year because of poor engineering.

What about graphics slots nowadays? I have an Nvidia 6600GT (PCIe), but I believe I'm seeing PCIe 2 in more specs. I assume backwards compatibility.

Any chipsets I should be focusing on? What's good now, as opposed to a yawn? I don't need RAID but it's nice to have.

I'm not much on overclocking. But if there's one area I might push as much as possible it'd be graphics performance. So if one chipset stands above the others in this regard I'd like to hear about it.

So....just looking to see how the mobo world has changed since '05. All suggestions are appreciated. Thanks everyone.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

must have:
-at least 1 pci-express x16 slot
-lga775/am2 socket
-sata ports
-top tier name brand (asus, gigabyte, abit)
-atx
-1333/1600fsb support

nice to have:
-intel chipset (p35, x38, x48)
-many sata ports
-dual pci-express x16 slots
-overclocking/stable reputation
-multple usb ports
-esata

 

[Mondoman]

I'd strongly suggest the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R for your price range. If you want Firewire and a few other things, go for the GA-P35-DS3P.

DDR2-800 RAM is plenty fast enough, since Intel CPUs channel memory through the FSB, and the current fastest FSB is 1333MHz (which is the speed of a pair of DDR2-667 RAM DIMMs running in dual-channel mode). Intel CPUs have been dominant over AMD for about 18 months, since Intel introduced their Core2Duo architecture. They're so good that you can buy a cheap e2160 (1.8GHz) and easily overclock it to 3GHz with minimal temp/voltage increases.