Hi!
It's been awhile but I'm building again and I've been reading forums and reviews about Z68. I plan on doing an i5 2500k, 16 GB of ram (I work with some very large RAW files in lightroom etc.) and will carry over my HD 4890 (which may get upgraded later and I'd like the posibility of crossfire). Already have a Corsair AX750 and it's going into a Corsair Carbid 500R. 1 64GB Samsung SATA 3 SSD boot drive, and 120 GB Kingstons HyperX SATA3 general drive. I'll have a SATA2 DVD burner and that's it. I won't be loading up on more SATA devices. My day to day computing/media consumption etc will all be done on my macbook pro. This machine is all about gaming and some photo editing. I don't care at all about the sound options as I'll be using an external USB DAC/AMP with headphones.
I keep all of my music and backups etc on an external drive and timecapsule.. I don't need any more storage in this machine as it's primary use will be gaming + photo editing with the finished photos being archived to a network or USB drive.
I will overclock the i5 to whatever it will easily take but I have no plans to tinker endlessly in the bios to squeeze out tiny bits of performance
So after all that here is my problem. I've read some good reviews of many boards. Oddly Anandtech is VERY sparse on Z68 reviews. Each time I decide on a board I check the reviews on newegg and there are many AWFUL reviews for all of the boards, which is unusual to me....
Gigabyte seems to boot loop, Asrock has DOA issues, Asus has an extreme number of customer complaints about their customer service to which they add canned responses to over and over again on newegg, MSI doesn't seem to offer anything compelling and I wasn't really all that impressed with the stability of the p35 platinum I have right now.
It doesn't seem to matter if it's a 300$ board or a 120$ board there are problems everywhere more than I've ever seen when researching a build before.
My question is, am I missing something? Or do all of these products have awful quality control this time around on this chipset?
I don't want a p67 board because I'd like the option of PCIe 3.0 and Ivy bridge in the future and I'd like to be able to take advantage of the Sandy Bridge GPU, because it's there. Which is why I wanted to go z68 but they all look like garbage.
I narrowed it down to the way too expensive asus pwhatever deluxe for 269$ or the Asrock Extreme3 Gen 3.
I don't really need the features of the Asus board but it's the only board on newegg that has consistently good reviews. (although only 17 of them).
Thoughts? Am I missing a source of information?
Thanks for any input.
It's been awhile but I'm building again and I've been reading forums and reviews about Z68. I plan on doing an i5 2500k, 16 GB of ram (I work with some very large RAW files in lightroom etc.) and will carry over my HD 4890 (which may get upgraded later and I'd like the posibility of crossfire). Already have a Corsair AX750 and it's going into a Corsair Carbid 500R. 1 64GB Samsung SATA 3 SSD boot drive, and 120 GB Kingstons HyperX SATA3 general drive. I'll have a SATA2 DVD burner and that's it. I won't be loading up on more SATA devices. My day to day computing/media consumption etc will all be done on my macbook pro. This machine is all about gaming and some photo editing. I don't care at all about the sound options as I'll be using an external USB DAC/AMP with headphones.
I keep all of my music and backups etc on an external drive and timecapsule.. I don't need any more storage in this machine as it's primary use will be gaming + photo editing with the finished photos being archived to a network or USB drive.
I will overclock the i5 to whatever it will easily take but I have no plans to tinker endlessly in the bios to squeeze out tiny bits of performance
So after all that here is my problem. I've read some good reviews of many boards. Oddly Anandtech is VERY sparse on Z68 reviews. Each time I decide on a board I check the reviews on newegg and there are many AWFUL reviews for all of the boards, which is unusual to me....
Gigabyte seems to boot loop, Asrock has DOA issues, Asus has an extreme number of customer complaints about their customer service to which they add canned responses to over and over again on newegg, MSI doesn't seem to offer anything compelling and I wasn't really all that impressed with the stability of the p35 platinum I have right now.
It doesn't seem to matter if it's a 300$ board or a 120$ board there are problems everywhere more than I've ever seen when researching a build before.
My question is, am I missing something? Or do all of these products have awful quality control this time around on this chipset?
I don't want a p67 board because I'd like the option of PCIe 3.0 and Ivy bridge in the future and I'd like to be able to take advantage of the Sandy Bridge GPU, because it's there. Which is why I wanted to go z68 but they all look like garbage.
I narrowed it down to the way too expensive asus pwhatever deluxe for 269$ or the Asrock Extreme3 Gen 3.
I don't really need the features of the Asus board but it's the only board on newegg that has consistently good reviews. (although only 17 of them).
Thoughts? Am I missing a source of information?
Thanks for any input.
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