Hi Everyone,

I have been reading this site for a very long time but have never posted. The information here has seen me through at least two system builds which have really been fantastic. I am now at the stage of wanting to build a new system and there is so much information out there that I just don’t know where to start. I don’t want to spend months doing research!!

Basically I am aiming for a system that can be used for hosting virtual machines like VMWare and MS Virtual Server. This will be the main purpose of the system and as such I am looking at a Core 2 Quad 6600 CPU, 8GB RAM (DDR2), fully populated with hard disks. Given this configuration what would likely be the best motherboard to get? I was looking at either a GA-P35-DQ6 or GA-N680-SLi-DQ6. I am not married to these or any one vendor, so would be happy with any suggestions.

With regard to video card, my idea was to use my current video card (WinFast A310) as graphics is not an issue given the use…and buy a top end video card for my current general use system (P4 2.8, 2GB RAM), which I use for games and watching TV.

OK. So that’s about it. Any help appreciated. Thoughts from you gurus out there?

Brant

PS: Apologies if these topics have been covered before. Just direct me the the threads.

The processor and ram you have selected get a thumbs-up from me. You should find that very sufficient for your needs.

The GA-P35 DS3R would probably suit you better, since you don't need to go SLI. If you want to go with DDR3 capability, you could go with the GA-P35C-DS3R.

Is your Winfast A310 AGP or PCIE though? You might want to doublecheck this, since most all new motherboards are PCIE....

Thanks for the information.

Im not certain why you say that I dont need SLi. and to be quite honest Im not even sure what SLi is.

There seem to be a number of interesting motherboards out there which is really making the choosing of one very difficult. Without doing any research and using the often silly idea that more expensive is better, I have narrowed the field to the following four boards;

GA-P35-DQ6
GA-N680-SLi-DQ6
Asus Blitz Extreme
Asus Striker Extreme

Any thoughts?

Brant

If you have a lot of harddisk you may want a raid card in the pci-e x4 slot and why are you useing a old p4 for gaming? The amd 939 x2 cpus are a lot better.