Help me choose motheboard and memory for E8400

Any one of the P5K asus mobo's will be good, I would go for 2GB of 1066Mhz ram which will run the E8400 at 3.6Ghz and have headroom left over for more, At 3.6ghz your ram will run at 800Mhz, with 1066Mhz ram at this speed you should be able to give the memory tighter timings.

cheers

you can get one of the P5Q series. Its a P45 chipset and supports the 45nm processor natively without bios update.

I'm using a P5K-E + E8400 with no problems. The only issue was that the CPU was not recognized correctly, and running at the wrong speed on bootup.

Download the latest BIOS on a USB stick from any other computer you can get access to, and flash it from within the BIOS.

Like I said, the PC will boot just fine, just the CPU won't be running at the correct speed until you flash. And yeah, I checked, the voltage is still recognized correctly before you flash, so you can't burn it.

i have the e8400 with the abit ip35-e and it works nicely. has all the overclocking options you will need and will easily get the e8400 to 4.0+. i run crucial 1066 with it which works well. you can usually get that at a good price. i also like the ga-p35 boards. i don't know about the p45 yet. i would wait and let them shake out the bugs before i jumped into that. just a little too new.

make sure you get a good cpu cooler if you are going to push the e8400 because it will get hot. i would recommend one of the top of the line air coolers i.e. thermalright ultra 120 extreme. i used the zalman 9700 which works ok but i have to run the fan at high speeds to keep it cool and that is too noisy for me.

Dechy is spot on, you can flash it after, as for memory i recommend Crucial, Ive had nightmares with OCZ but crucial has always been stable, If your not going to oc the e8440 over 3.6Ghz, i would recommend crucial ballistix cas4 pd6400, runs great on my rig at 4 4 4 12 2.1v. most ram at 1066Mhz runs looser timings at 5 5 5 15.

cheers

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820146731
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820220293

The things to look at when choosing memory are timings and voltage. 1.8v is the standard for DDR2 but most modules are sold at a different voltage which means the manufacturer is selling them at their overclocked rating. The two examples I linked to above illustrate what I'm saying. With the first one (Mushkin) the voltage is 1.8v and the timings are 5-4-4-12 where as the second set (Patriot) the voltage is 2.2v and the timings are 4-4-4-12. That is a lot of extra voltage for almost the same timings which tells you that the Mushkin are using better chips. In this situation the Mushkin are likely to be able to match the Patriot with a modest 1.9v or something like that. Manufacturers have been trying to do something a little tricky to those that only look at timings when purchasing by jacking up the voltage to make their timings look better and disguise the fact that they are using lesser chips.