Gail Shaw wrote:
> I'm busy specing up a new PC. I'm having trouble picking a motherboard
> though, any advice?
> 
> Processor = Intel Core-2 Quad, 2.66
> 
> The board must support at least 4 GB of DDR2 800 memory.
> Must have at least 4 SATA-2 ports. No RAID requirements
> Must have at least 6, preferably more, USB-2 ports
> No need for onboard LAN, video or sound. I'm buying or have seperate cards
> for those.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> 
Just bought a new machine based on a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 motherboard. 
It meets or exceeds all of those requirements and was quite inexpensive.

Processors: Intel Core 2 Extreme, Quad, Duo, Pentium D, Pentium 4, Celeron
FSB: 1333/1066/800 MHz
Memory: 4 x DDR2 DIMM (up to 8Gb)
4 x SATA 3Gb/s
12 x USB 2.0 / 1.1 (8 back panel, rest internal or front panel depending 
on case)

Also has on board 10/100/1000 LAN, Audio, RAID, legacy IDE etc and 
plenty of overclocking support which I generally don't touch.

There are many variations on the gigabyte P35 range depending on how 
many SATA connectors, Firewire, on board video etc you want.

While I can't say that Gigabyte is better or worse than any other brand 
in this generation, I can say that the MB is very neat, feature rich and 
(so far) without problem.  All of the benchmarks for P35 chipset based 
systems seem to be equivalent to within the margin of error.

Overall I am very satisfied with the performance gain over an Athlon 
1800XP machine that lasted me for about 5 years :)

Post a reply to this message