Newbie needs help

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ffaucg

n00b
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Mar 22, 2008
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I'm planning to purchase and throw together a computer towards the end of March and I need help picking out certain components. I've decided to get Quad Core Q6600, with video card 8800GT or perhaps the 9600GT (haven't made up my mind yet but it's probably the 8800). I do not plan or foresee myself getting another card for SLi. Which kind of motherboard is good for non-SLi machines? I think I've done some reading while I lurked here and saw that P35 is the chipset to get for non-SLi machines. Is that still true?
 
I'm very happy w/ my new Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3P it's very stable running an E3400 @ 3.0 G's...
 
What kind of budget are you looking at?

I've never had a problem with any P35 board I've run.
 
Next question is what features are you looking for?

If you don't need RAID or firewire, you can get by with something as cheap as the IP35-E ($60 after rebate right now). Do you want/need 2 x16 slots? The more options you add, the more the price goes up.

With a $1000 budget, you can probably get just about anything on that list and still stay under your budget number.
 
kirbyrj said:
Next question is what features are you looking for?

If you don't need RAID or firewire, you can get by with something as cheap as the IP35-E ($60 after rebate right now). Do you want/need 2 x16 slots? The more options you add, the more the price goes up.

With a $1000 budget, you can probably get just about anything on that list and still stay under your budget number.
Click to expand...

I bought a close rig for a friend of mine (Q6600+8800GT+1X1GBOCZ@800) and went for Abit IP35-E
the choice was between it and the GA-P35-DS3L (not DS3R or P) and I went for the IP35-E

If you don’t care about extra features (crossfire, SLI, RAID, eSATA, heavy OCing, …etc) it’s all what you need (and it’s great for OCing too)

$60 :eek: :eek: :eek:, I paid (from my friends money :D) exactly $128 for this board (from a local retailer)
oh I forgot that I eventually went for the E6550 not the Q6600 cuz of my friend’s very tight budget (I even paid from my own pocket to help him get the 8800GT)
 
Did you get the IP35-E or the IP35?

$128 sounds about right for a retail price of the vanilla IP35.
 
I don't foresee myself ever going to using SLi. I would like to overclock.

"If you don't need RAID or firewire, you can get by with something as cheap as the IP35-E ($60 after rebate right now). Do you want/need 2 x16 slots? The more options you add, the more the price goes up."

I don't have any firewire devices as of now, but having a port would be nice to have, but then again I heard having a firewire port with a windows os isn't very secure.

I don't know much about raid but I heard p35 chipset motherboard doesn't natively support ide harddrives. Would I have to buy a Pci adapter to hook my old drives up? Also are you able to RAID with sata and ide's mixed up? I am still undecided as to how big the sata drive I get should be if I'm not going RAID. I suggested a single drive with 1TB but a friend told me this isn't a good idea if it's to be used as the main drive (C:/).

As for RAM I'll be getting DDR2-800 type ram as they are cheaper than the 1066 variants some motherboards support.
*edit* Btw what's the max amount of memory Windows support? I heard if you have higher than 4 gigs that you should switch to a 64bit os.
 
ffaucg said:
I don't know much about raid but I heard p35 chipset motherboard doesn't natively support ide harddrives. Would I have to buy a Pci adapter to hook my old drives up? Also are you able to RAID with sata and ide's mixed up?
Click to expand...
True but they pretty much all come with an addon IDE controller (usually a JMicron) integrated onto the mobo so no unless you have more than 2 IDE drives you wouldn't have to buy a PCI controller card.
nVidia chipsets iirc can RAID across IDE & SATA but P35 can't because it has no IDE support.
*edit* Btw what's the max amount of memory Windows support? I heard if you have higher than 4 gigs that you should switch to a 64bit os.
Click to expand...
as you say it depends upon which version of Windows - 32-bit supports 4Gb but usually a large chunk of the last Gb is reserved for addressing according to installed hardware so typically you would only see ~3.2GB as available.
 
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