Need help picking an intel mobo

[Sagekilla]

Hi all, I'll be upgrading my system soon to an intel quad core but I need some help picking out a motherboard.

I'll be basing my system off the Q6600, mainly for price reasons because I can't justify the extra $50 for the newer ones, and my budget is too tight to get it. With that said, that leaves me with roughly ~$170 - $175 to spend on a motherboard (I already have some RAM at home for the motherboard) and I can't figure out which one to get.

I need a motherboard that can support at least 8 GB (and, ideally, 16 GB for future upgrades) since the programs I use typically eat up 4 GB of RAM very easily. I don't know if there exist any motherboards that still have 2 PATA ports, but that's a huge bonus for me since I'm still running some old drives on that.

Other than that, I don't really mind what else the motherboard has.. I just need a solid, stable motherboard, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a good overclocker either. I'll do some more research and look around for boards that meet that, but I tend to have an extremely difficult time picking one out.

Thanks all!

 

[akhilles]

You sound like an educated buyer. In fact, some Yorkfield owners are dumping the 45nm cpu's for Kentfield's low price & performance. They say it's not $100 faster.

Most modern mobos support 8 gigs. That's a given. As for 2 PATA connectors, some nvidia-chipset mobos have those. i.e. 650i. I feel you're limiting yourself to older chipsets. Both the old chipsets and PATA, along with floppy are on the way out. SATA will be around for a while. You can put your old IDE drives in a NAS & pick up a small SATA HDD for OS. Same thing with people who can't not have IEEE on mobo and limit themselves to more expensive selection when they can pick up an IEEE or IDE card for $10.

 

[Sagekilla]

Hmm I suppose.. I might as well ditch the PATA drives eventually. At the moment, I already have 4 drives in the system -- one being PATA, and the other three SATA, along with two optical drives (one PATA, one SATA) which maxed out all the ports in my system..

With that in mind, do you have any suggestions for motherboards to steer clear of? That's more or less what I was looking out for -- I don't wanna end up with a finicky motherboard or something of that sort. I figured I could go the safe route and go with the tried and proven motherboards that many people seem to be suggesting.

Off to newegg!

 

[Shimmishim]

I will have to say most P35 motherboards are the way to go especially for quad overclocking.

Asus P5K series
Abit IP35 series
DFI P35 series

are all good and should fit your needs.