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

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

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.

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/prod [...] 6816131004

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.