Motherboard Advice

farna_boy

Hi all,

I looking into building a new pc at the moment but I'm unsure which mobo to go for. I have seen some good reviews of the Asus P5KC or the Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R both of which support DDR2 and DDR3 ram, which could futureproof the pc to some degree but I'm not sure would I just be better off going for a DDR2 board and spending a bit more. Any advice would be appreciated.

The rest of the kit will be something along the lines of:

PSU:Seasonic S12-650 "Energy" 80Plus, 650Watt

GFX:MSI NX8600GTS-T2D512E-HD-OC, NVIDIA 8600GTS, 512MB, PCI-Express

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Box 4096Kb, LGA775, 64bit, Conroe

Thanks in advance!

TerrorFirmer

Gigabyte board is good. Not sure about the Asus will leave that to someone else. As for futureproofing, people worry about it too much. DDR2 is more then sufficient for a considerable time yet, as are current CPU's for anything but the enthusiasts.

Ditch the 8600GTS, about as bad a choice as you could make. This is much cheaper and infinitely faster, like comparing night and day. Even a 100 euro X1950Pro will outperform that GTS.

brophis

I have the Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R and think it's a great board. Real easy overclock. The rest is probably covered in all them reviews.
I agree with Havok on the DDR2, nothing to worry about, by the time DDR3 becomes afforadable it'll be time to change mobo anyway.

I have the ATI HD3850 on its way to me at the moment, great performance for the price of it from benchmarks I've seen.

If you want to future proof you might consider getting the Q6600. It's E60 extra and you can overclock it to match the E6750 easily. More applications are starting to take advantage of multiple cores now and the Q6600 is at a bargain price. But of course it'll be down to what you plan to use the machine for.