Much ado about nothing? Mobo help...

[TheCur]

Hi folks, long time lurker here, but 1st time posting. 36 y/o electrical engineer, who loves to game. Hoping to get some advice from those of you that have "been there, done that".

I'm in the midst of a new C2D system build and have come upon the old "Which mobo do I buy?" question. A little background on what I am building towards, mainly a gaming rig. I'm looking to OC to around 3+ GHz, 2x2Gb of DDR2-XXXX RAM, 8800GTX (only a ~25% chance I will ever go SLI), some flavor X-Fi, big case, good air cooling. I've got "decent" oc'ing experience (starting in the days of Celery 300A's and BH6's) so I'm not scared off by a little tweaking. I am not really budget constrained, but I am bang-for-the-buck conscious.

I really like the BadAxe2, for it's reputed stability and all around ease of use (plus Intel-on-Intel can't go wrong), but I love the idea of unlinking the FSB and memory bus speeds for the 600-series nVidia chipsets. It is this feature where I am hung up.

My crux is this... Am I making too big of deal of this one feature? It just seems so great and increasing the flexibility and ease of oc'ing that for whatever reason, I can't get past it.

Thanks in advance for you thoughts and opinions.

 

[kirbyrj]

Personally, I think you're making too big of a deal of that one issue. From what I've heard, it doesn't work 100% of the time and it limits your OC. I cannot confirm these issues firsthand, but I'm around here a lot reading other people's gripes .

I think a good solid 975X/E6600 combo would suit you well. I have a system comparable to what you're looking at doing, and it's definitely the fastest system I've ever built. Games play great on my 24" LCD .

 

[romeozor]

i'd suggest you read about the X-Fi products, since vista has some issues with sound cards (as i heard), better not waste money. i'v heard creative is making some workarounds for the issue, but better safe than sorry.

 

[kirbyrj]

i'd suggest you read about the X-Fi products, since vista has some issues with sound cards (as i heard), better not waste money. i'v heard creative is making some workarounds for the issue, but better safe than sorry.

I'd just use onboard sound and see if it's good enough for what you want. High end boards are Dolby Digital compliant and have the HD Azalia codec instead of AC97. That being said, I've never fired up my onboard sound either instead going with the X-Fi, but I think I'd be fine without it honestly.