Having been a mild 'fanboy' of AMD since the K6-2 days, I recently came to a hard decision and decided I simply couldnt justify the price of an A64 3500 when the Pentium D 805 was so much cheaper and such a legendary overclocker

Unfortunately the mobo I bought with it (which was an 865 chipset board, I need AGP and DDR support here!) did not support it, which does make me wish Intel would have a socket change each time they change compatibility rather than leave the annoying guesswork, but no matter....

As such I'm in the market for a new Mobo, and have a couple of Ideas in mind....

The Asus P5VDC-X, which annoyingly only has 2 DDR slots, but also has 2 DDR2 slots, AGP and PCI-E tho I understand the x16 slot is only x4 electrically.

The ASrock 775Dual-880Pro, which seems almost the same board, not surprising as ASrock and Asus are the same company I suppose....

The idea here is that I can upgrade in stages and dump the mobo when I have a PCI-E gfx card and DDR2 ram - Although I own one of the 24 pipeline Gainward 7800GS cards based on the 7900GT chip so this is likely to last a while.

Anyone have any better mobo suggestions? I realise the ASrock one doesnt allow me to increase the CPU voltage, and therefore limits my overclock, but I cant find any reviews of the Asus one at all so I'm not sure.

Thanks!

You should buy a 965 chipset motherboard, for future Conroe upgrades.

what about the 775? isnt that o ne beter ? (the o ne with suport for core 2)

It's too bad you didn't wait. Upgrading to Core 2 is a great option but the price of the 3800+ is now $144 at Newegg.

AM3 chips will be compatible with AM2 mobos.

A 965 chipset board will probably be my eventual aim, but means replacing a £250 graphics card, as I'd have to goto PCI-E.

As I said I currently have the 7900GT based gainward card and see little point in ridding myself of it yet, hence the motherboards I have looked at, allowing me to 'transition' to PCI-E and DDR2 piecemeal.

My next upgrade will be a couple of DDR2-800 CL4 1gb sticks, then maybe a gfx card, then a new mobo, quite possibly on the 965 chipset. The old mobo can then be combined with a £40 Celeron and palmed off on a family member

Is it just me, or is the intel naming structure for their chipsets a bit difficult to understand? I'm not an intel guy, so it could be that I just haven't looked to see the differences, but I can't tell what the major differences should be between the 965, the 975, the 975x and so on. I can tell that they should be increasing in performance, but thats about all I can tell. Is there anywhere where there is a direct comparison showing the physical differences between the chipsets? I'm thinking that this sort of problem is what has caused this thread in the first place...

975X is the only kind of 975 as far as I know. 965 is the mainstream Conroe chipset, while 975X is the performance option. 945 is mainstream for dual-cores, while 955X is supposed ot be the performance option. In reality, you'd get a 975X since it has the broadest chip support and is faster, not to mention supportive of three 16X slots, (OK maybe they run at 8X, it doesn't matter since the bandwidth isn't fully used anyway), supporting crossfire so that you can run 3 ATI chips, two for crossfire, and one for physics.

975X FTW. There.

What about SLi support? is that only via the nForce4 Intel edition or can the Intel 965/975/whatever support it? (and do intel realise how annoying it is when they make a CPU and a chipset with the same model number, making use of google 965x harder? )

I sound like a complete newbie here but the intel world is more different from the AMD world than I expected...

This is the board you were originally looking for:

http://www.asrock.com/product/775i65G.htm

Note that rev. 2.0 and above supports Conroe.

On sale at newegg for under $50.

I thank you for your fairly complete explanation of recent intel chipsets. I also thank you for completely proving what I was getting at: the entire product line of intel is very confusing. You can't tell right off what one chipset has that one (very similarly numbered) may not. With the AMD chipsets, its Nforce, Nforce SLI, SLI32, etc. The names are pretty self explanitory. Same with the chips: you have the 3200 through the 4400, and the X2 variants.

I must comment that the older intel processor lines were easier to differentiate: P4 2.5 is slower than a P4 2.8 and so on. I understand the reasoning behind switching to a more arbitrary number system, but it seems to me a bit too arbitrary.

Just my little rant. Maybe if I were more steeped in the intel hardware lines I would understand it more, but I just can't see the differences, unless they are either shown to me or explicitly explained to me. I understand the processor lineups, the higher number, the faster, but the chipsets are still foreign to me. Hopefully AMD will come out with something that is better when I am ready to upgrade (6-8 mos, at least) and I won't have to learn a whole new product line just to know what I'm getting.

Yes I must say the same, the intel situation seems hugely overcomplicated to me, as an AMD veteran.

You can pick any S939 CPU and it will work in any S939 mobo, the same with S754 and AM2.

Add to this that the same LGA775 socket can use DDR, DDR2, or both depending on the chipset, and its quite annoying!

Still, when the Pentium D 805 cost me far less than an A64 3500+, I just couldnt justify sticking with AMD