New Mobo - recommendations?

dathiultaigh

looking to upgrade a file/app/home made media system and I am looking for some specifics from the mobo. Listed below is what I want ftom the new mobo anyone know or can recommend something thats meet these particulars :

wanted on the mobo:
Socket 775 - intel quad core supported
Sata 3.0
over 2 Gig RAM capacity
both AGP and PCI-Express slots
onboard NIC 1 gig

Optional :
Onboard sound 7.1

I have all others parts to spare like say vid-card,hdd,ram,psu and cpu to spare but I want to get the mobo right as I want to be able to continue to have the option to upgrade it for quite while.

DirkVoodoo

Not many boards still offering AGP, I don;t know of any that offer both PCI-Express and AGP. I think the ASRock 775 does, not sure.

Bazsutto

Yeah as dirkvoodo said, AGP is old school.

A good alternitave in my opinion would be the Asus P5B-Deluxe edition.
It has all the rest of your desires including

-2 GIG NIC's,
-Core 2Duo/Quad Core
- 2 PCI Express x16 slots allowing a second Graphics card to run in x4 Mode.
-up to 8 Gb RAM
- 8 Channel Hi-Def Audio
- SATA plus an external SATA port on the back

This Board is ment to be a savage overclocker aswell.

I know you probably have an AGP graphics card but i would defo recoment upgrading this at the same time as the Mobo!

pduffy50

Bazsutto wrote:

Yeah as dirkvoodo said, AGP is old school.

A good alternitave in my opinion would be the Asus P5B-Deluxe edition.
It has all the rest of your desires including

-2 GIG NIC's,
-Core 2Duo/Quad Core
- 2 PCI Express x16 slots allowing a second Graphics card to run in x4 Mode.
-up to 8 Gb RAM
- 8 Channel Hi-Def Audio
- SATA plus an external SATA port on the back

This Board is ment to be a savage overclocker aswell.

I know you probably have an AGP graphics card but i would defo recoment upgrading this at the same time as the Mobo!

I have this board and its excellent, great for overclocking

d_advocatus

Before you rush off and buy a P5B-DLX consider that you will need a soundcard aswell 'cos the onboard audio is absolute ****. It is a great overclocker but it does have a few problems, and the drivers are buggy as hell.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=112648

If you're looking for AGP and PCI-E the Asrock Dual-VSTA has both albeit the PCI-E is x8 rather than x16 but most x16 cards will work as they don't come anywhere close to the full bandwidth that PCI-E can offer.

It has four RAM slots, 2x DDR and 2x DDR2, each able to take 1GB. It has one NIC but I think it's only 100baseTX. Also only has 2x SATA-150 ports. It's also dual-core only. I think there's a newer version out now that supports Quad though.

The Asrock board is as far as I know the only board that really supports AGP and PCI-e. There is an ECS board that says it supports both but it's really limited in the AGP cards (only about 20 I think) that it supports.

dathiultaigh

Cheers lads for the feedback ... geuss the best choice is to just go for a PCI-Express only mobo then and place my old ATI 850 xt in this new mobo and then buy a 8800 GTX for my current rig.

Any sign of the prices coming down any time soon for the 8800 GTX's or you know of any good deals from retails stores in Dublin or online - (would rather a GTX over a GTS)

EDIT : Just checked the prices on GTX cards - bit mental might just go for a GTS - know of any good deals from retails stores in Dublin or online

8T8

Generally Point of View or Club3D have the cheapest cards.

There is also a cheap inno3d card on Dabs.