Motherboard decision

[falkengeist]

I narrowed my search for a motherboard to Intel DG965WH or DG965RY for use with a Core 2 Duo E6750. I went to Newegg's site to look at the reviews and found a fair amount of negatives for both. I then started looking at other boards and found almost everything had a fair amount of negatives. Can this be attributed to people that don't know what they're doing or talking about, or are these boards really bad. Like everyone else, I certainly don't like the headaches involved in using problem parts, but now I'm not sure what to use. This is just a system for small business, and the boards listed provide features that I need at a good price. The currently recommended chipset (P35) doesn't offer me many advantages since tweaking, etc. is not part of the game plan. In fact one of the boards I listed was a previous recommendation in the mid-price ATX category. Important is a serial port for a 3Com Courier, RAID, upward flexibility (CPU), memory), and imbedded audio, video and LAN are pluses. The 2 boards listed cover all the bases, and I've had little trouble with Intel boards in the past. Any thoughts?

 

[Miramonti]

How about a more current p35 chipset board? No serial port (that I'm aware of) but you can get a usb adapter for that.

 

[falkengeist]

Intel only offers one board in the Media category for this chipset. In any case, when I looked at other boards using the P35 I still see a lot of negatives, especially Gigabyte, but there are even quite a few negatives with the high end boards. Maybe I'm looking for something that just isn't there???

 

[DSF]

Take negative Newegg reviews with a grain of salt. There are a lot of people out there who don't know or don't care how to troubleshoot properly. Gigabyte, ASUS and Abit are all making solid P35 chipset boards.

The Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R has onboard RAID, lan, sound and a serial port. The only thing it doesn't have is integrated video, but you can pick up basic PCI-express video cards pretty cheap.