Basic Info

[davcohen]

Quite out of date with computer parts in General, when i was buying parts a couple of years ago the best brands within my budget were Asus and Abit

What is the best motherboard that can be had for under £50 for a Q6600 these days, not interested in over clocking or built in graphic/ sounds/ wireless cards

just something that will make a stable system withing the above budget

[PeterStoba]

51 pence over, but!

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+%28Intel%29/Gigabyte+GA-P35-S3G%2C+iP35+Express+Socket+775+Motherboard+?produc tId=32058

[davcohen]

so how would that differ to something like this?

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+%28Intel%29/ASUS+P5B+775+Motherboard+?productId=28163

[wonderlust]

Peter's board has a P35 chipset, which is sort of current (P45 chipset is due any day)

the other is an old 965 chipset

[davcohen]

so basically futureproof in other words, so Gigabyte is a good brand of Mobo these days

any other brand i should be looking at

[wonderlust]

well nothinf is future proof, the next gen' intel stuff is due in under 12 months and these will need a whole new motherboard socket/chipset.

Asus, gigabyte, MSI are all good brands but each has it's own good and bad boards,

If you're looking to go budget Asrock boards tend to be very stable imho

[marsey99]

most brands offer great stabilty @stock speeds with all componants they are compatable with.

[davcohen]

Ok so its best to choose a Motherboard with the P35 chipset, what about the Nvidia chipset or is that also old news?

Any other Opinions on Motherboards before i choose this one?

[wonderlust]

The £50 budget is a little restrictive, but a little bit more will open a wider selection of boards

[davcohen]

Please expand on that although i cant stretch to much although if its worth while id do it

[wonderlust]

well a motherboard with a ihc9R south bridge will provide, iirc more sata ports, and more usb ports, along with more sata options.

you get other features to, like heat pipe cooling, and all solid capacitors etc

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+%28Intel%29/Gigabyte+GA-EP35C-DS3R+P35+Socket+775+Motherboard?productId=31059

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+%28Intel%29/MSI+P35+NEO2-FR++Socket+775+Motherboard+?productId=28015

but your looking at around £70 rather than £50

[davcohen]

Well in laymans term is that something i would actually need lol?

not worried about overclocking really and i will only be running 2xh/d and a dvd drive, also im unsure what a solid capacitor is?

if these mobo's perform better with everyday usage then the other i would be willing to up my budget otherwise as normal user i would probably never take advantage of the other features

[wonderlust]

well if you don't need the features...

As far as solid caps go, it is supposed to aid longevity of the motherboard. In recent years there were issues with electrolyte capacitors, may devices (not just pc's) were assembled with fake/lower quality capacitors, these started to fail early some leak, some start to bulge. The solid caps have less issues with heat and in many instances cleaner builds.

Gigabytes reason for using all solid caps :-

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/FileList/NewTech/2006_motherboard_newtech/article_02_all_solid.htm

Heat pipe chipset coolers keep (obviously) keep the chipset cooler, which helps performance as far as overclocking is concerned, but also keep temperatures down in your case as a whole which aids stability.

Many people now consider overclocking to be part of normal systme tweaking, some of this is due to the high quality of the intel chips, ie most q6600 will do 3Ghz without changing any voltages, it's just changing the FSB from 266 to 333. eg mine will do 3.6Ghz with more tweaking but as the voltage rises so does heat but at a lot greater rate.

[davcohen]

Ok so its best to choose a Motherboard with the P35 chipset, what about the Nvidia chipset or is that also old news?

Sorry if you dont mind to explain if Nvidia's chipset are worth anything or should i stick with the P35 chipset?

[davcohen]

With regards to overclocking im well behind with that although jumping from an AMD3000XP on a single core with just a gig of ram running in dual channel anything will seem fast, although saying that my PC didnt seem that slow for what i was using it for

[wonderlust]

I have no experience of Nvidia chipsets for intel. but I have always had the view that Intel know what goes best with their processors

[davcohen]

I have no experience of Nvidia chipsets for intel. but I have always had the view that Intel know what goes best with their processors

I guess thats a good enough reason

[marsey99]

intel chipsets do get the best out of the intel cpu but nforce chipsets get more from the ram and better sb performance.

swings and roundabouts.

edit

if you have your hart set on a quad then i would go with a p35 board (but the better 1s with more features will cost more than £50) or if you will get a duo the p5n e sli (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+(Intel)/ASUS+P5N-E+SLi+NF650i+Socket+775+Motherboard+?productId=266 86) is a great board or this from msi if you want uba budget (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+%28Intel%29/MSI+P6NGM-L+Nvidia+MCP73U%2FPV%2FV+Socket+775+Motherboard+?p roductId=30539), tbh these will do quads but wont clock them.

if you want an "older gen" then the good old p5b (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+(Intel)/ASUS+P5B+775+Motherboard+?productId=28163) is still a good bet.

[davcohen]

intel chipsets do get the best out of the intel cpu but nforce chipsets get more from the ram and better sb performance.

swings and roundabouts.

do you not get better value out of the Nforce board then the Intel ones?

[marsey99]

you tend to get more features from the nvidia chipset on the low end, but thats a intel thing as amd/ati chipsets for amd have more features than intel 1s for the low end.

the msi 1 i linked to in my edit above is a good eg, it has raid and some other features that are not on the budget intel boards. it also supports quads but i cant see it liking the power draw if you get all 4 cores loaded, those 3 power regs will get a bit warm to say the least.

[davcohen]

so if i push m budget upto around £70 then this one is probably the best one i can get?

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+%28Intel%29/Gigabyte+GA-EP35C-DS3R+P35+Socket+775+Motherboard?productId=31059

this also seems to support DDR3 which the first gigabyte board didnt, im assuming DDR3 being the next gen ram if better then having DDR2

although its more expensive now i could look to upgrade in the future when it drops down in price

[wonderlust]

if you wish to have that future proofing then yes a board that supports both types of ram is the way to go

[davcohen]

ok someone local on another forum i used has offered me an ASUS P5K3 Deluxe board brand new for £60

would that be superior to what has been posted here, seems to have the heatsinks and P35 chipset that was mentioned earlier

[wonderlust]

That board is DDR3 only.

[davcohen]

That board is DDR3 only.

well i can get the board cheap if its really worth it ill have to work a few more overtime at work :lol:

if DDR3 worth it or should i just stick with what has been mentioned, although im assuming DDR3 runs at a higher rate and giving much better bang for your buck?

[wonderlust]

there is an advantage with higher speed ddr but the cost outways the perfomance still, ie a 2gb kit off cas 4 ddr can be got for under £25 ex vat

[davcohen]

even still assuming i bought that board and stuck a set of these in there

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Memory/DDR3/DDR3+1333+%28PC3-10666%29/CORSAIR+2GB+PC3-10666+Twin-X+DHX+?productId=30813

surely my system would be quicker then running DDR2 unless having a lower cas really increases performance over the clock speed

(btw thanks for being patient here about half way back up to speed thanks to you guys)

[wonderlust]

your best bet is to read up on some of the techie sites, iirc you need cas 7 to match ddr2 800 @ cas4, but I may be very wrong.

A couple of techie sites I use

tomshardware
anandtech
trusted reviews

[davcohen]

just read a quick article and you are correctly currently there doesnt seem to be much point in going for DDR3 due to the price of the RAM so i think ill stick with DDR2 and then try picking the best ram i can

[wonderlust]

well the patriot super special takes some beating, it runs up to 500mhz @ cas 5! all for £23+vat

a good link about ddr2 and ddr3 http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2989&p=2

[davcohen]

ok everything has arrived apart from my case and psu which will arrive friday. now reading through the manual there seems to be a 1000 settings for everything shall i just literally pop the CPU and ram in and leave it be or do i need to tweak the settings to get factory clock speeds

please advice me, i assume best to run it in before instantly over clocking it

[mac124]

Yep put it toether and turn it on it should be set to auto which in most cases is fine and requires no tweaking.

[marsey99]

you might need to alter ram timings/volts to get the best out of them.

[davcohen]

ok got it all built up today and havent touched a single setting as of yet and all i can say is its fast as ell lol, what i wanted to know is how to setup Sata2 or if it was already done

i just literally took the harddrive out the box without any jumper and plugged it in how can i tell if its running sata2 which i assume is faster then sata1? there seemed to be like 8 different slots had no idea which is which

or what had to be setup in the bios to enable sata?

[marsey99]

it should default to the fastest setting, if you want to see how fast it is there are many benchmarks to test your harddisks.

[davcohen]

so it automatically sets up the fastest sata setting me for regardless of which ever connector is plugged in, i thought i had to enable something in the bios

[davcohen]

also im not sure my ram is running on dual channel unless i missed it on startup it says 2.0gb or ram

i slotted them next to each other as it has 2xdd2 1xdd3 then a gap and the same again rather then one in each seperate block

[marsey99]

ram should be in slots of the same colour to be in dc mode.

almost everything will be on in the bios other than raid iirc.