Intel core 2 CPU/motherboards

The latest Intel chipsets for the C2D/Quad core/Penryn processors are the P35 and the X38. None of the mainstream boards with these chipsets offer 5 PCI slots. There are a lot of Mfg.'s out there, but ASUS and Gigabyte offer well known enthusiast/overclocker MB's suited for high performance Intel quad core chips. USB is your friend.

Both the Abit IP35 and IP35 pro have 3 normal PCI slots which are positioned well enough to remain usable with a single dual slot PCI-E graphics card. The main difference between the two boards is that the Pro supports crossfire, whereas the normal one only has one PCI-E slot, but is a lot cheaper:

IP35
http://www.overclockersclub.com/re [...] ider/3.htm

IP35 pro
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/m [...] html#sect0

I personally decided on the MSI P35 Neo 2 as it has the same features including crossfire support, and was also cheaper then the non crossfire Abit variant. However it only has two PCI slots which is fine for me as I only need one for my sound card.

MSI P35 Neo 2
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdo [...] i=3169&p=2

Have a read on the specs and see if any of them suit your needs. I myself have 2 Sata drive, one is 300 GB Sata 1 with 8mb cashe, and the other is 500 GB sata 2 with 16mb cashe which I bought because my 300 gig is full.

Yeah, all this 21st century stuff.

Why not do the onboard stuff, it is like free pci cards. Are you using special applications that have to be done with dedicated hardware? Fact is the old PCI bus is dying because thall basically share the same bandwidth where with PCI-e each slot is its own bandwidth lane. Therefore you get better performance from the onboard stuff because a lot of it is run on PCI-e lanes. Installing the driver is a piece of cake. Just put in the CD that comes with the motherboard and it installs the USB, network, chipset drivers and onboard sound which is pretty good now days if you get a higher-end board. Apparently SoundBlaster is going to be supplying the Audigy chips and possibly the X-FI chips to board makers(rumor I have heard from diff sources). My ASUS Maximus Formula SE came with a sound card that fit in a 1x PCI-e slot.

You can also get IDE ports that fit in a PCI slot if you need to keep your 2 IDE optical drives. However, I would first see how the resources are managed on the 3 PCI slots.

ANOTHER SOLUTION
An ASUS board that might be what you are looking for may be a workstation board like the P5WDG2-WS-PRO . They have (2)PCI and (2)PCI-X slots. The PCI-X slots are backward compatible with PCI

http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx? [...] =82&l3=249

I have one of these that I use as a gaming board but I am just changing to the ASUS Maximus Formula SE. It is a great board and has been very stable for me. Zipzoomfly has them for $280 and Newegg for $200 but they are open box from newegg. ALSO get the PRO version NOT THE NON_PRO VERSION. The PRO version is compatible with QUADS and Dual core with no problem.


Pricey but that is what you may have to do to get what you want.

If it were me, I would go with the onboard stuff

Then the P5WDG2-WS-PRO might be better for you because PCI-X (PCI-X is different than PCI-E), has better isolation for your cards lanes. It is used for RAID and 64bit network cards but if fully 100% compatible with normal 16/32bit PCI cards. What you are paying for is workstation quality/stability. It overclocks very well also BTW.

bah thats great. just saw a PCI Ex network card lol. of course more pricey than the PCI cards....

ok so I guess that solves a problem.

still concerned about the IDE issue.... I have 3 IDE Devices, 2 of which can be put onto 1 channel but what about the other.... ?

Hi,

sata dvd writer/dvd-rom are cheap, buy one or two instead of using an old ide cdrw.

If you really really want to use all your ide stuff, you can still buy an P5W DH Deluxe that have two ide channel.

However, it does not fully support the penryn 45nm core2duo, but you can still use the 65nm ones.

Brad