Need a motherboard reccommendation

[tim0]

Hi all,

I was wondering of someone could reccommend a quality motherboard to me.

It is for a gaming system with an E6400 and I would like it to have good onboard sound for my headset. I might want to OC in the future, most nofty features such as SLI and FireWire I probably won't use.

Also: why use FireWire of there is USB?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Tim

 

[sweetpants]

Hi all,

I was wondering of someone could reccommend a quality motherboard to me.

It is for a gaming system with an E6400 and I would like it to have good onboard sound for my headset. I might want to OC in the future, most nofty features such as SLI and FireWire I probably won't use.

Also: why use FireWire of there is USB?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Tim

Well I use the Gigabyte 965P-S3:

I've got to say that I like it. I'm always looking for "bang-for-buck" value, I believe that motherboard is it. I'm sure there are more feature packed boards but they come with a price.

 

[tim0]

Ok, I was already looking at that one, but does anybody know what the difference is between the S3 and the DS3? And how is the onboard sound?

Thanks,
Tim

 

[BUFF]

only difference is solid (non-electrolytic) capacitors which should have an extended life.

 

[Nossy]

There's an increased in about $10 since last month, it's at $118 now for the S3 boards. The DS3 is at $126.99. I'd give up $8 for the DS3, it has better durability for OCing.

Good motherboard for OCing would be the Gigabyte P965-DQ6 (DS3 should be fine) or Abit QuadGT, even the Asus P5B Deluxe or P5W Deluxe. I guess it comes down to MB layout and features. P965 boards are very popular nowadays, but you should look at the 975X boards also (Although only P965 officially supports DDR2 800 while the 975X support DDR2 667). Another reason to consider the 975X board is that they natively support IDE drives while most of the P965 boards uses the JMicron controller (which has been headaches for many).



Firewire is still used (Especially for digital camcorders) because it can maintain transfer speed while USB has a bigger variation. USB 2.0 has a higher max transfer rate (I believe its 420Mbps) and Firewire is 400Mbps, but if you transfer a 1 gig file (video) Firewire will get it done faster because there's not a big drop-off in transfer rate like USB 2.0.