Best, most cost effecient LGA 775 Motherboard?

Im going to be getting a system based around C2D just like you in couple months. and ill probably be getting the ASUS P5N-E SLI. It can be had for 140$ at newegg right now. [H] did a review of it here.

Iv looked at the ASUS P5N-E SLI PLUS, only real difference is SLI runs at 16x instead of 8x like ASUS P5N-E SLI does. 8x doesnt make a difference in real world performance as so iv read in the review.
 
I'd say stay away from the ds3/s3. The biostar 965pt is cheap and nice. Asus p5b vanilla is fairly cheap as well. All have their quirks though, but with some finetuning are decent
 
I vote for ds3... I own one. GREAT board for 125 bucks. Bios are so incredibly easy to use. My friend's p5w dh deluxe was very confusing to use for me. I have my OC to 3.51 with 1.475 volts. My advice... Get an E6600, ds3, and some buffalo firestix. Good performance and great value for what you're getting.
 
If you're only running stock speeds, you can probably get away with a cheaper 945 chipset and save $40 or so. If it were me though, I'd probably go with a DS3 like everyone else :D. I had a rev. 1 DS3 and it was a good board. My brother uses it still and OC's his E6300 to 2.8Ghz on the stock cooler.
 
for the money a ds-3 or s-3 in 965p are about tops-- the biostar t-force 965pt could be a good mb as well but i haven't built one yet . i bought a s-3 months back --when they were cheeper than the ds-3 series . for overclocking it has been a great mb--esp for the $116 price i got it for shipped--:eek: :cool: since the price of the two are so close i would likely get a ds-3 if i was buying one now--there the same mb's except for the solid caps
 
I bought an assrock 775dual-vsta board from newegg, its nice because it supports celeronD's all the way up to core2duo's, and it can use either ddr , ddr2 , agp or pciX. It was also a reasonable price 50$ish. Of course, you want to overclock , and this board isn't the best pick for OCing. It lets you go crazy with the fsb, but theirs no voltage options, and most of the memory divisors don't work with aggressive memory timings.
 
Yet another vote for the Gigabyte DS3... hopefully you'll get a rev 2.0 or better yet 3.3 :cool:
 
Here are some choices from what I own:
Cheap,single GPU,good OC Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 e6300 @ 3.0 GHz with little effort.

Cheap,SLI,good OC 650i chipset real basic board ASUS P5N-E SLI runs 8x in SLI
e6600@ 3.1GHz with little effort.

Spend a bit more and get the P5N-E SLI Plus has a 650i but runs 16x SLI

Go for big air and get the 680i board..........ASUS P5N32-E SLI......all the good stuff, OCs like a dream.
 
Heres a link to a review that compares Rev. 1.0 with Rev. 2.0

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/print.php?cid=6&id=2156

From what I've read the major differences between Rev. 2.0 and Rev 3.0 include native 1333 MHz FSB support and a new 2.5x memory multiplier.

I wonder how they made it so all 3 versions use the same bios, yet 3.3 is the only one that will boot a 333fsb cpu at 333. I know they reworked circuitry, but it sounds a little fishy. If the 1333strap was supported in all versions, I don't understand why they needed to change circuitry to allow for the new dividers as part of the 1333 strap. I'm wondering if it could be simply that there's part of the bios that's programmed differently and causes it. If so, maybe there'll be a way to extract that and force flash it on older platforms.

For instance, with the new F10 bios on my rev2, when I put in a cpu with bsel flags set to 333, it'd boot, but at 266. When I used an older bios (F7) that had no support for understanding bsel flags for 333, it refused to boot.

I may try doing the mod again and testing in my p5b vanilla since people have claimed it doesn't work, which I refuse to believe at this point.
 
Heres a link to a review that compares Rev. 1.0 with Rev. 2.0

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/print.php?cid=6&id=2156

From what I've read the major differences between Rev. 2.0 and Rev 3.0 include native 1333 MHz FSB support and a new 2.5x memory multiplier.

Hmm that review is for a DS4 with the ICH8R not sold in US afaik.

I dont think all 3 DS3 versions use the exact same bios, at least the download for Version 1 and 2 are different, I am sure they are 96% the same but its the 4% that matters.

Version 3.3 has had the voltage regulator circuitry modifed for better Quad core compatibility and who knows what else. Bios has support for 1333 FSB cpu and 2.6 memory multi. Not a big deal since ver 1 will do 400 FSB, mainly for manuf and Joe Sixpacks so new cpu will boot at its normal defaults.


Some not so detailed info on version 3.3
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4507&s=1

GA-965P-DS3 (rev 1.0) http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Moth...rboard&ProductID=2314&ProductName=GA-965P-DS3
GA-965P-DS3 (rev 2.0) http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Moth...rboard&ProductID=2405&ProductName=GA-965P-DS3
GA-965P-DS3 (rev 3.3)
not on usa site atm
 
Hmm that review is for a DS4 with the ICH8R not sold in US afaik.

I dont think all 3 DS3 versions use the exact same bios, at least the download for Version 1 and 2 are different, I am sure they are 96% the same but its the 4% that matters.

Version 3.3 has had the voltage regulator circuitry modifed for better Quad core compatibility and who knows what else. Bios has support for 1333 FSB cpu and 2.6 memory multi. Not a big deal since ver 1 will do 400 FSB, mainly for manuf and Joe Sixpacks so new cpu will boot at its normal defaults.


Some not so detailed info on version 3.3
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4507&s=1

GA-965P-DS3 (rev 1.0) http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Moth...rboard&ProductID=2314&ProductName=GA-965P-DS3
GA-965P-DS3 (rev 2.0) http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Moth...rboard&ProductID=2405&ProductName=GA-965P-DS3
GA-965P-DS3 (rev 3.3)
not on usa site atm

My mistake :eek:

Thanks for the correction :cool:
 
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