I've decided that before Spore arrives, I'll be getting a new system. Started looking at parts thisevening, and most of it's easy. But on motherboards, OMG, how many bloody chipsets and variants do we need?!

With that said, hopefully someone else can point me into the right direction. My preference is to steer away from ASUS - I've been pointed to the ASUS P5E, that's maybe about the most I want to spend on a board - this isn't a system that's going to be used all day. My current systems are an X2 3800 w/6800 that I've not come across anything I can't do with, though the Spore demo was a little bit slow. The main system getting all the use is this MBP C2D 2.33, and that's plenty fast enough.

Components I've decided will be going into it, unless new s*** comes around or there's significant price changes:

Intel X9450
nVidia GTX260 based card. This'll be most likely driving either or a 27" Dell and/or 17" LCD (172X).
4GB RAM.
74GB Raptor
320GB Barracuda ES (it's sitting here, might as well use it)
Possibly one other drive.
SATA DVD burner. Ie, this system needs 4 SATA headers.

Features it should have:
Reasonable integrated sound
Firewire a big plus
At least 1 GigEth port

Things I don't give a s*** about:
SLI.
Overclocking.
RAID.


So. Pointers/opinions?
Timeframe for purchase is late August, so there's heaps of time to decide.

Edit: It's also possible I'll just say "ah f***it" when it comes to spending $1600 on some of it, if an X2 is gonna do the job - just buy the GTX260 and monitor, and blow the rest on bike parts :P~

to save some money would go the ATI 4870 over the GTX260

and with motherboards the P35 or X48 are good!!!

P5Q Pro or P5Q Deluxe
Go with G.Skill Ram, works great with the P5Qs, so I've heard
EDIT: and what I've heard comes from very credible sources

last edited by Lynx at 23:10:01 08/Jul/08

P5Q Pro or P5Q Deluxe

dont bother with the raptor

nVidia GTX260 based card.

Urgh... Wouldn't bother. 4870 kills them.

I'd look at Gigabyte P45's. There are about 10 variants of them :D

looking at getting this computer just waiting for the dust to seattle on the graphic card wars...

Intel ATX E8400 CORE 2 DUO /3.0GHz/6MB/1333FSB/LGA775
Gigabyte GA-X48-DS5 1600MHz Dual DDR2-1200 Dual PCI Ex16 SATAII RAID PATA GLAN 1394 8Ch DTS UDES ATX
DDR2 4G(2x2G)PC8500 1066Mhz Reaper OCZ
Western Digital 300G SATAII VelociRaptor 10000 rpm HDD
Western Digital 1TB SATAII 32M 3GB/s(WD1001FALS)
Sapphire HD4870 512M GDDR5 PCI E TVO
Pioneer DVR-215BK 20x Dual Black OEM with software- SATA
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion with I/O Drive & IR
Thermaltake Xaser6 VG4000SWA Silver Sluminum case(NO PSU)
Corsair TX-750 750W ATX Power
Microsoft Windows Vista Ulitmate 64bit Edition (OEM)

$2852

that looks pretty sweet;

fair price for all that gear also

You're probably hooked on the idea of Intel for CPU but Asus' M3A-H-HDMI is a good board without too many frills and a Phenom 9750 is a lot cheaper than the Q9450. Add the 4870 to that build and you'll be an AMD convert in no time. :-)

I just got a Phenom 9750 on a Gigabyte 78G-DS3H and it's pretty nice for a work machine. I have a pair of Nvidia 8600GTs for multi monitor support pre-upgrade.

Wot Mongie said......go the P45 chipset if your not buying till August there will be a few around. I also wouldn't bother with the 74Gb Raptor, I've got a 150Gb raptor in my system and its been good but has now been surpassed buy some of the 7200RPM drives for performance. If you can't afford a 300Gb Velociraptor then I'd suggest going for a 750Gb Samsung Spinpoint......very fast and great value for money.

Agreed, don't bother with the Raptor.
Instead get your self a 640GB WD, they have dual 320GB platters in them and are very fast.
OR
2x Samsung 500G in raid. They'll own the raptor and cost only $152 for both.

OH WAIT LYNX, RAID 0 IS STUPID!

Whoa carm yourself, I meant raid 1. And what's wrong with raid?

Whoa carm yourself, I meant raid 1. And what's wrong with raid?

You mean aside from not actually having any true redundancy unless you have at least 4 drives? (No, RAID1 is NOT properly redundant).

You buy a raptor for the read speeds not redundancy.
Am I missing something here?

Also, just found out the Samsung F1 640GB also have 2 333GB platters in them so they should be just as fast as the WD640GBs

last edited by Lynx at 15:37:07 10/Jul/08

so all this talk up upgrading PC's has got me considering doing the same

can anyone give me any advice on these 2 mobo's

Asus M3N78-EMH and Asus M3N78-EH

both seem very similar apart from video card differences..

MSY sells the EH and umart sell the EMH

thanks

You buy a raptor for the read speeds not redundancy. Am I missing something here?

Nope.

Also, just found out the Samsung F1 640GB also have 2 333GB platters in them so they should be just as fast as the WD640GBs

From memory the Samsung F1 using the 333GB platters were faster, including the 320gb version and 1TB. But it's been a while since I've bothered to look at reviews plus there have been new releases for the WD drives.

I'd never buy an samsung HDD.
They have had a huge failure rate here at work...

Isn't that funny, I've had no problems with all the samsung drives I've bought (around 30) but have returned around 20% of the seagates (around 50). Just bought my first batch (10) of WD 1TB drives 2 weeks ago, will be interested to see how they go.

Newer Samsung's (F1) have supposedly been pretty good... The old ones were s***.

Yeah I'd also vote for ditching the raptor. I'd get 2 cheaper normal hard drives and set them up in raid0.

A firewire card will set you back about $20, I wouldn't include the presence of firewire in making a decision on a motherboard.

i'm converting to intel finally D:

was going to go amd, but i've been told intel is the way

welcome aboard pave, im the same

never bought intel until i got my 6850

very happy, if i had better cooling (only stock atm), i could run it at 3.6g all day long

I recently upgraded my PC with a GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3P LGA775 P4 P965 BOARD. It's got firewire on board, about 8 SATA headers, the onboard sound is good, and has the prerequisite gig ethernet port. My last board was also a gigabyte, and it went along wonderfully well until I decided to upgrade our media centre using it (and, in fact, still goes well).

Anyway, good luck with ur search.

Intel ATX E7200 CORE 2 DUO 2.53G 3MB Cache 1066FSB LGA775 $153.00
Asus P5K-SE-EPU S775 P35 FSB1600 DDR2 PCIEx16 SATA2 GbLAN ATX EPU $108.00
DDR2 2048MB(2x1G)PC8500 1066Mhz 5-5-5-15 G.Skill(F2-8500CL5D-2GBPI) $79.00


keeping it cheap, i know you'll say get more ram but i'm not about to change to vista 64 or anything like that to take full advantage of it

í'm going to sit on the video card decision for a while

yer i was an AMD user until my dad ended up getting a p4 3200, since then i've just sat on intel, seems way more reliable then the old AMD gear i had.

The 7200 is a pretty popular cpu at the moment, apparently it overclocks really well...

i'll probably over clock it to whatever i can get it to in the asus software thing the mobo comes with, can't be assed f***ing around with voltages and s*** in bios

I know, holy thread revival.

So the 'late August' system upgrade never really happened, but today I got sick to death of having to put up with the slowness of a MacBook Pros HDD trying to handle virtual machines, so gave in and went and purchased some new bits. I'd have used my old X2-3800, but the motherboard in that died too.

End result:
ASUS P6T
Intel Core i7 920
6GB (2x3GB) Kingston 1333MHz DDR3
Gigabyte 9600GT

We'll see how it all goes shortly - just installing Vista64 on it at the moment.

X58 imo.

Why a 9600gt?

-1, Vista 64

Sigh. Well looks like that system lasted about 2 hours before dying in the ass.

Installed Vista, it went to reboot... and never came out of the coma.
Have tried removing all drives, video card, RAM in various banks and not at all, re-seated the CPU... board has power, but no fans spin up.

So it's all f***ed, and I can't get it replaced until at least Monday.



As for why a 9600GT... I dunno. I just needed a new video card as my old ones were all AGP. Figured somewhere down the middle, and I wasn't going anywhere near an ATI with a 50 foot pole.
Vista64 over XP64 because well, it's time I Just got over it - MS are trying to pull the plug on it so I'll just have to give in. Needed to be 64 so I can make use of the 6GB.

I'm gonna take a guess here and say that you've hit hibernate instead of shutdown. This happened to a buddy of mine, his computer went into the "coma" and nothing would work. reset the bios and all should be good.

Did that, reset the bios, even removed the battery. Besides, that kind of s*** shouldn't keep happening when you've removed power from it, and tried a different PSU, etc etc...

Pretty convinced at this point the mobo is f***ed.

Did that, reset the bios, even removed the battery. Besides, that kind of s*** shouldn't keep happening when you've removed power from it,

You'd think eh? but no.
Only way to fix that is to boot into some sorta shell, delete the hiberfil.sys from the root directory an fire it up normally. Regardless, that won't stop a board from POSTing.

Have you tried assembling it outside of the case in the event it's earthing on something (like an uneven standoff or the IO shield is making contact where it shouldn't eg, touching a USB port?)

Hey Raven

Mate i had almost the same set up as you, accept i originally used Team DDR3 Memory - I also used Kingston and I had the same issues

I ended up using a cheapy Ram called AData - BOOTED!!!
There is an issue with i7 systems and certain DDR3 brands, voltage issue. See if you can get that memory changed for this Adata brand or something very basic and test that.

I went through 3 motherboards ( 2 x Gigabyte and an Asus P6T) and tested with another CPU until i came across this memory.

I ended up with a i920, Asus P6T and Adata memory working nicely! Remember to place all memory in the ORANGE slots 1st.

Hope this helps you.

last edited by BOHEMION at 01:39:46 15/Feb/09

Well, board was certainly dead - was replaced happily. It's since been slowly getting set up, though hasn't been without it's problems - SATA transfers have been pretty slow (avg 6MB/s, max 18MB/s) on both the Intel and JMicro controller.

More annoying though is how it won't come out of a coma. When the system goes to sleep, it won't wake up - fans spin back up, but it never recovers. I have to power it down and cold boot it, though at that point it seems the state has been saved to the hiberfile so it comes out of hibernation. Keen to fix this as it's a pain.