Need a good Mobo Please help

[solidsnizzle]

well ive been researching and need some suggestions on a motherboard for under 130$ Im trying to save as much money as possible so anything under 130$ with good value is really apretiated

Here will be my setup

Q6600
8800GT
500 watt PSU
2GB mushkin
500GB WD 7200rpm

I was looking at the IP35 and it seems to be an exelant board for the price but 2 things turn it down for me

No firewire and no RAID

On that topic how much would RAID matter to me ?? since I dont know if i will be doing more HD drives because I don't think I will be using more than 500GB. I might but just dont know. But just to be future proofed will it really be needed in the long run ??

I plan on making this rig for playin games and doing multitasking so anything along those lines. And thats why i have decied to chose the P35 northbridge.

A perfect game i wish to run an good settings would be crysis on high settings with 1600X1200 with over atleast 30FPS constant.

 

[humanure]

the Abit Ip35 has RAID and Firewire, for $130 that's what I would buy. Also, RAID isn't really important for most desktop users so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Abit IP35

 

[darbius]

Since you said you're trying to save money wherever you can, you may also want to consider saving yourself $35 and getting a 250gb hard drive instead. Unless you're installing many many HUGE programs or have a music collection pushing 80 gigs, you'd be hard-pressed to use up 250gb any time soon. The nice thing about hard drives is that putting another in later isn't all that hard to do if you find all 250gb of that drive disappear. Also, when you hit that point, the drive might be running a little faster anyway. Just a thought.

As far as RAIDs, unless you're a total performance junkie, you wouldn't even notice the difference of a RAID over a single drive. Also, the over-arching concern with a RAID performance setup is always that if one drive fails, everything is toast even if the other drive is fine, and statistics are rarely in your favor on that, so I'd say you'll always be better off sticking with a non-RAID setup. Even if you install a second HD at some point, I'd still say run them as independent drives (one that has all your games on it and one that has all the other junk).

I've also heard good things about the GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3R which is also $130. Let us know what you decide to do.

 

[kenrippy]

there is such thing as RAID 1 which would be useful when you have an archive of mp3's, photos, or whatever you don't want to lose due to hardware failure.

RAID is very useful, even for the non-perfomance nut.