MOBO for college student/ gamer first build

[pen360guin]

Hey i really need help choosing a new motherboard. I have a friend who pushed me ASUS so thats primarily what I have been looking at. For on one my problem is i i cant pick between Intel and AMD i hear AMD is good but their not doing so well fiscally. Here are the main things I am looking for in a motherboard.

The case will hold ATX or extended ATX. its the cooler master cosmos case.

64 bit cable(i heard i should look into it. should it matter?)
6 x Serial ATA
SLI or would Crossfire be better.
at least 4g of ram
I dont know if wanting to put in an HD dvd or blu ray drive will affect anything
The case will fit 7 PCI cards and i would like no less than 7

I am currently a student in college and im into gaming. I plan on using a vizio 32 inch LCD tv as the monitor as well so i dont have to go buy a new one. I would prefer not to spend over $300 which seems to be the range of most.

By the way this will be the first computer i will build

 

[Noya]

Answer these questions first.

1. What is your budget for the whole PC?

2. What is this PC going to honestly be used for? (gaming, pRon, video edit, etc.)

 

[pen360guin]

1.) I would liek to keep the rest of the PC punder $1000 I bought a WD 1TB HDD for it already. I can go over this budget if it needs to.

Im looking at Cooler Master 1000w power supply
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171022


2.) Im a CS major and i would like to go into designing programs probably working for a company though not too much on my own PC. I would love to get into designing websites which would be using Flash.
I also want to use it for gaming. I plan also using this to back up my dvds and other media on. I would like it to be able to fully use HD. Also a concern of mine is if its practical to hook it up to the TV i mentioned before. I doesnt have a DVI slot but it does have an HDMI and supports 1080p.

 

[pen360guin]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131013

would that be a bad board? someone mentioned checking out the new NVIDIA 780 boards because they support 3GPUS but i wonder if thats not excess. Also that board doesnt have an eSATA port.

 

[amberion2dp]

1000w is extreme overkill unless you wanna do triple SLI, which you won't be able to manage with a 1k budget. 550-600w should be sufficient for your budget.

 

[pen360guin]

Tne budget is for right now just to put it together as time goes on i plain on adding more 1tb harddrive as they fill. I will bebacking up my dvd collection on this box. would that still be too much power? The drives are WD's greendrives and im trying to be as low power as i can but i wanted to makes sure I have enough power for the future. Triple SLI is only on the new NVidia boards right?

 

[chuckm]

You will get more "bang for your buck" by staying away from the boards that do SLI. I would stick with a P35 motherboard and a 8800GT gpu. This power supply should be all you need;

http://www.buy.com/prod/corsair-520w-sli-certified-modular-atx-power-supply/q/loc/101/203270716.html

 

[cisco]

Corsair is a decent power supply but it's not in the same league as PC Power & Cooling. This model is one of the best for the money. Even Maximum PC used it in their $1,500 build a month ago or so. A single 12v rail is better than multiple 12v rails.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817703005