Parts recommendations

Stephen

I plan to build myself a nice new E6600 conroe machine for Christmas. I've been an AMD man for years now so I know nothing about Intel motherboards. What motherboard and RAM would you recommend? I don't require decent onboard sound (have an Audigy 2 zs). Great overclocking ability is not a priority, but nice to have.
Basically I'd like something similar to my current Abit AN8 s939 board

I have a PCI-E 6800GT to drop into it, which will probably be upgraded at a later stage. I also have a decent Hiper 580W modular PSU.

One problem I've noticed is that a lot of the new Intel boards only have one IDE port. I have three IDE disks and one SATA, plus an IDE DVD burner, so I'd really like 2 IDE ports. I could live with replacing one of the IDE disks and the DVD burner with SATA devices if necessary.

Thanks for any advice!

8T8

Well some motherboards come with an extra IDE controller integrated into the board so that could have a bearing on your choice.

If you don't fancy the thought of adding a PCI IDE controller into the mix what you could do for two of the hard drives is get an IDE->SATA converter see bottom of page on OcUK (few places I could see that still has them). That would make two of the HD's SATA compatible and leave one HD and the DVD burner for the single IDE channel on the Intel board.

Also a possibility pick up a SATA DVD drive like a Samsung SH-W183 decent enough drives and you eliminate another IDE device.

As for RAM get 2GB if you can doesn't really matter what brand as long as it is compatible with the motherboard.

Not into overclocking myself so maybe someone else can suggest a motherboard.

Stephen

Yeah I had intended getting 2x1GB of ram anyway, but I don't know what speed to get.

quazzy

Hey Stephen,

I'm going to get a similar system to yours - based on the 6600 CPU

Found this bundle on komplett - has mobo, 6600, 2Gb of Ram.

This kit includes:

322633 - Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz Socket LGA775, 4MB, BOXED w/fan 320345 - MSI P965 Platinum, P965, Socket-775 Firewire,SATAII,ATX,GbLAN,DDR2,PCI-Ex16
313834 - Corsair Value S. PC5300 DDR2 2048MB Kit w/two matched Value Select 1024MB
317429 - Antistatic Wrist band Blue including ground cord

I'm certain all of the above is compatible but I'm not too sure about Ram speeds etc but I'm sure someone else can give a thumbs up or down to the above

Regards,

Q

Stephen

Thanks Quazzy. Any more motherboard recommendations anyone?

koneko

Asus P5B seems to be a good board aswell