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Heya,
I am getting ready to build my Conroe system within the next month or so, and after looking at motherboards, I pretty much have it narrowed down to the Asus P5B Deluxe (on the egg for $250) and the Gigabyte DQ6 (on the egg for $280).
They both have the features I want, lots of internal SATA ports, the P5B has an E-SATA which I definately want as well, I am not sure about the DQ6. They both have onboard RAID5 support (which I plan on using), both have gigabit ethernet, plenty of PCI-E slots (though the Gigabyte has an extra PCI-E 1x), onboard Firewire, and the P965 chipset. The Asus in addition has built in Wifi, which I won't be using here, but it might come in handy down the road.
My question is, which of these boards seems like the better choice? The Asus has more features for less money, and I have always trusted Asus boards in the past, as far as I am concerned they have been the best availible. I don't know much about Gigabyte, I always had thought they were a fringe manufacturer and that stability was not their big concern, I just don't have much experience with them, thus not much faith. Plus, all of the issues the DS3 has been having with certain RAM isn't comforting me any.
I plan on doing some OCing, I will be getting the E6600 chip, and if I can take it up to around 3Ghz I will be happy, this seems to be a pretty mild OC from what others are getting, and I will be doing it on stock air or a quiet air heatsink. Stability, however, is more important to me than anything else. I would prefer if I don't have to do a reboot more than once a week. SLI is not important to me, and honestly neither is Crossfire. I will never use more than one graphics card, this isn't going to be a gaming rig, more general use and a LOT of audio processing, DV-camcorder video work, and dvd-shrink and related encoding.
Also - both of these boards only have 1 IDE channel. There are some 975 boards out there that have two, which would be nice, as I still have some IDE devices, but I guess I could get some adapters for my IDE hard drives or an IDE expansion card if I had to. Do you lose anything going with the 975 vs. the 965?
And on one final note - I have heard some rumors about a Badaxe 2 coming out from Intel. An Intel motherboard that offered me the minor OCing options I want (I don't care about voltage adjustments, I would never up the voltage on my CPU) i.e., basic ability to up the FSB some, would probably be ideal. Are these just rumors or is this actually coming, and have there been any potential specs leaked?
Thanks for any help you can give, this is the first new system I am building in four years, so I have fallen out of the loop when it comes to motherboards.
I am getting ready to build my Conroe system within the next month or so, and after looking at motherboards, I pretty much have it narrowed down to the Asus P5B Deluxe (on the egg for $250) and the Gigabyte DQ6 (on the egg for $280).
They both have the features I want, lots of internal SATA ports, the P5B has an E-SATA which I definately want as well, I am not sure about the DQ6. They both have onboard RAID5 support (which I plan on using), both have gigabit ethernet, plenty of PCI-E slots (though the Gigabyte has an extra PCI-E 1x), onboard Firewire, and the P965 chipset. The Asus in addition has built in Wifi, which I won't be using here, but it might come in handy down the road.
My question is, which of these boards seems like the better choice? The Asus has more features for less money, and I have always trusted Asus boards in the past, as far as I am concerned they have been the best availible. I don't know much about Gigabyte, I always had thought they were a fringe manufacturer and that stability was not their big concern, I just don't have much experience with them, thus not much faith. Plus, all of the issues the DS3 has been having with certain RAM isn't comforting me any.
I plan on doing some OCing, I will be getting the E6600 chip, and if I can take it up to around 3Ghz I will be happy, this seems to be a pretty mild OC from what others are getting, and I will be doing it on stock air or a quiet air heatsink. Stability, however, is more important to me than anything else. I would prefer if I don't have to do a reboot more than once a week. SLI is not important to me, and honestly neither is Crossfire. I will never use more than one graphics card, this isn't going to be a gaming rig, more general use and a LOT of audio processing, DV-camcorder video work, and dvd-shrink and related encoding.
Also - both of these boards only have 1 IDE channel. There are some 975 boards out there that have two, which would be nice, as I still have some IDE devices, but I guess I could get some adapters for my IDE hard drives or an IDE expansion card if I had to. Do you lose anything going with the 975 vs. the 965?
And on one final note - I have heard some rumors about a Badaxe 2 coming out from Intel. An Intel motherboard that offered me the minor OCing options I want (I don't care about voltage adjustments, I would never up the voltage on my CPU) i.e., basic ability to up the FSB some, would probably be ideal. Are these just rumors or is this actually coming, and have there been any potential specs leaked?
Thanks for any help you can give, this is the first new system I am building in four years, so I have fallen out of the loop when it comes to motherboards.
