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

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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 :)

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> No need for onboard LAN, video or sound. I'm buying or have seperate cards
> for those.

I'm sure you know this, but make sure you have enough slots for these.

I had to ditch the modem when I installed a wifi card in my home machine 
due to lack of pci slots.

(It didn't really matter anyway because the main reason for the wifi 
card was that there's no phone line in the basement and I had to put my 
DSL router in another room, so the modem was not going to be used for 
anything anyway)

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   sympatico.ca  */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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"Francois Labreque" <fla### [at] sympaticoca> wrote in message
news:47dd277c$1@news.povray.org...

> > No need for onboard LAN, video or sound. I'm buying or have seperate
cards
> > for those.
>
> I'm sure you know this, but make sure you have enough slots for these.

I will check, but is just 3 slots. One PCI express (for graphics), 2 pci.
for sound and wifi
I haven't seen a motherboard with less than 2 pci slots yet.

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On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:42:07 +0100, Gail Shaw sa dot com>  
<"<initialsurname"@sentech> wrote:
> "Francois Labreque" <fla### [at] sympaticoca> wrote in message
> news:47dd277c$1@news.povray.org...
>> I'm sure you know this, but make sure you have enough slots for these.
>
> I will check, but is just 3 slots. One PCI express (for graphics), 2 pci.
> for sound and wifi
> I haven't seen a motherboard with less than 2 pci slots yet.

Be aware though that the layout of the board may prevent you from using  
some slots, especially those closest to the graphics card.


-- 
FE

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"Fredrik Eriksson" <fe79}--at--{yahoo}--dot--{com> wrote in message 
news:op.t74fjkbe7bxctx@e6600...
> On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:42:07 +0100, Gail Shaw sa dot com> 
> <"<initialsurname"@sentech> wrote:
>> "Francois Labreque" <fla### [at] sympaticoca> wrote in message
>> news:47dd277c$1@news.povray.org...
>>> I'm sure you know this, but make sure you have enough slots for these.
>>
>> I will check, but is just 3 slots. One PCI express (for graphics), 2 pci.
>> for sound and wifi
>> I haven't seen a motherboard with less than 2 pci slots yet.
>
> Be aware though that the layout of the board may prevent you from using 
> some slots, especially those closest to the graphics card.

     Yes, I've noticed this from what I've read so far, some of these new 
boards are getting a bit too tight for a small or low tower.

        ~Steve~


>
>
> -- 
> FE

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"St." <dot### [at] dotcom> wrote in message news:47dd64b2$1@news.povray.org...
>
>      Yes, I've noticed this from what I've read so far, some of these new
> boards are getting a bit too tight for a small or low tower.

I'm so sick of tearing my hands on the inside of a PC case. These days, I
don't buy anything other than a full tower case. Plus, since I usually have
2-3 hard drives and 2 DVD drives in a machine, I need a full tower to fit
them in without squashing the drives together.

Post a reply to this message

"Gail Shaw" <initialsurname@sentech sa dot com> wrote in message 
news:47dd671b@news.povray.org...
>
> "St." <dot### [at] dotcom> wrote in message news:47dd64b2$1@news.povray.org...
>>
>>      Yes, I've noticed this from what I've read so far, some of these new
>> boards are getting a bit too tight for a small or low tower.
>
> I'm so sick of tearing my hands on the inside of a PC case. These days, I
> don't buy anything other than a full tower case. Plus, since I usually 
> have
> 2-3 hard drives and 2 DVD drives in a machine, I need a full tower to fit
> them in without squashing the drives together.

      Well, my present tower is 16.5" high x 7" wide x 18" long, so I 
'think' I could fit something new in it - not sure what a 'full' tower is 
without checking, but with what you want Gail compared to my min spec board, 
you may have to choose wisely with this one. It might be a good idea to 
email said board merchants to get their opinion?

     And yes, I know what you mean by 'tearing your hands'. My first tower 
was a tiny thing, (still got it sat next to me doing nothing), and when I 
tried to put a new HD in it, I couldn't help scraping my hands! Back then I 
wished that they built bigger towers, and now they're here.  :)

     ~Steve~


>
>

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On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:30:18 +0100, Gail Shaw sa dot com>  
<"<initialsurname"@sentech> wrote:
> I'm so sick of tearing my hands on the inside of a PC case. These days, I
> don't buy anything other than a full tower case. Plus, since I usually  
> have
> 2-3 hard drives and 2 DVD drives in a machine, I need a full tower to fit
> them in without squashing the drives together.

I find that full tower cases tend to just give you a lot of empty space  
where you do not need it, and force you to use longer cables. There are  
some really good midi-tower cases by Antec that are very easy to work  
with. Some think they are expensive, but they are well worth it.


-- 
FE

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Gail Shaw wrote:

> I haven't seen a motherboard with less than 2 pci slots yet.

I'll tell you something that *I* noticed...

I had a look on ebuyer, and almost *all* the motherboards had *exactly* 
the same feature set until you start getting pretty expensive. I mean, 

PCI slots, same number of SATA slots, etc. [Many of them lack IDE 
entirely, which is potentially problematic...]

It's as if they all use the same chipset or something...

Once you get into the "really" expensive ones, a much wider variation is 
apparent. Convergent evolution?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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