Some advice on buying please

[Havok316uk]

Hi im going to change my mainboard and memory in the next week or so. I have been nosing about the reviews and there seems to be too many good boards all with pros and conns. I have roughly £173 to spend on a mainboard tops. Im looking for a DDR3 mainboard that supports LGA 775. I am a bit of a nForce and asus fan boy but I dont mind going for something a little different. I have been looking at the following mainboard. I am also looking to do some slight overclocking and keep my Q6600 at 3.0ghz min.

I am looking for...

- A mainboard using DDR3

- Atleast 6 SATA ports

- RAID stripe supported

- Gigabyte LAN and or Wifi-n

- CrossFire Support

- PCI Express x1, x16(2.0) min

I have come accross the following mainboards

Asus P5Q3 Deluxe Wifi Intel P45

MSI P45 Diamond iP45

unless any of you guys know of any better high performance boards please let me know cheers

 

[DeMoB]

I'm using the P5Q3 Deluxe myself, and it's a pretty decent board.



Dan

 

[Havok316uk]

I'm using the P5Q3 Deluxe myself, and it's a pretty decent board.



Dan

Exellent sounds good!

also been looking at DFI Lanparty they seem to be faster and more overclockable but doesnt have a very good bios crash recovery. Anyone have any views on this?

 

[Kojak71]

What RAM do you have at the moment? I would question the need to move to DDR3 for socket 775 cpu's, there's really no need for it. Otherwise you're right to be looking at P45 based motherboards as they all support natively what you are looking for (save for WiFi). Personally I'm starting to prefer Gigabyte boards, they've got every conceivable permutation of layout for the P45 chipset, one of my rigs is using the Gigabyte GA-EP45C-DS3R (which supports both DDR2 and DDR3). It comes to under £100 + £30 for 4Gb DDR2 RAM. I'm using it as stopgap for when socket 1366 based mobos become more affordable, and when DDR3 also comes down in price.

 

[Havok316uk]

I purchased the P5Q Deluxe Wifi AP@n Mainboard with Patriot DDR3 1600mhz 6gb pack. Runs amazingly! Overclocked it to 3.67 ghz on air cooling at 45 degrees using Arctic Freezer 7 fan. Knocked it back to 3 ghz for now as using a Q6600.

 

[Kojak71]

I assume you mean P5Q3 Deluxe (which supports DDR3), as the P5Q Deluxe is the DDR2 variant. Either way nice one, those heatsinks look mighty impressive. What temps are you getting at 3GHz?