New Motherboard Help (need one w/ express 8x slot)

[msudude]

My question is a little different than the other motherboard help topics. I'm looking for a LGA775 board which will fit a x8 raid card. Will the x8 raid card fit in an x16 slot? In that case, could I just get a board with two x16 slots and use the other one for the video card? I don't want to put it into a 1x because I want the full performance out of the card. I also wanted ddr3 so my memory could run natively at the processors FSB speed (1333). I've been looking at these boards below. Let me know what you think.

Processor is an E8400

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131188
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131181
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131200
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121090

Thanks

 

[chookman]

RAID card will fit into any 16x slot no issues... infact its what i do with my RAID card thats a 4x interface.

You only need 667mhz DDR2 to run a 1333 CPU it works off clock speed not overall so:

DDR2 667 = clockspeed 333 x 2
CPU 1333 = clockspeed 333 x 4 quad pumped

i would stay away from the combo board (ddr2 and 3 support) they generally arent as stable and you wont be able to install greater than 4gb later on if you wish.

Id suggest the Asus P5K-e as its solid, has support for e8400 on latest bios and has a 2nd 16x PCI-e slot

 

[msudude]

So, at least with AMD processors, I remember that matching the FSB and memory speed was important. Is that still the case on these new Intel boards? What are the differences in performance between FSB 1333 and DDR2/1066 or DDR3/1333?

Im happy that will fit into a x16 slot because I couldn't find any x8 slot boards around.

 

[hairycat101]

No one really seems to know how memory works. Heres a little break down. DDR2 800 is the same thing as PC 6400. I will use the DDR2 terms. Front side bus is just the system bus times 4. Lets take the duel core pentium that runs at 800 FSB for example. The system bus is 200.

Now DDR2 800 runs at half the DDR2 value. DDR2 800 runs at 400 MHz. At 1:1 ratio then, the pentium duel core, runs its ram at 200 MHz so the ram speed at 1:1 is DDR2 400. You can change the ratio to run the ram faster then the system bus on many MoBos. You could run the ram at 1:2 where the ram speed is twice the system bus. In this example the ram speed would be 400 MHz or DDR2 800.

 

[msudude]

You're right. It looks like I need to get an X38 board for true 2 * x16 support. So now I'm looking at the following:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131219
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813127033
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131236
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128326

Is it worth the extra cost for solid state capacitors? What about ABIT vs ASUS vs Gigabyte?

 

[msudude]

Well, I really had my heart set on an Intel board. They seem to be of higher quality nowadays then even Nvidia boards. And from what I've seen the X38 should offer real dual x16 support. I'm getting the following raid card:

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?item=N82E16816131004

I think I'm just going to go with the cheapest ASUS mb as I don't need the features of the other boards. I'm hoping I can get the controller working. I'm not in a particular hurry to get this altogether so if something doesn't work, I will just exchange it. Now I have find someone at work with a spare LGA775 processor so I can update the bios to work with my E8400 =(.

Thanks for your help. I'll post back if I get everything working.