Hi, I'm having trouble deciding on a motherboard for a new system. I'm going to mostly be using it for a render box so I don't need any special graphics capabilities. I'm looking for stable, reliable, and hopefully inexpensive. I'm going to use a Q6600. I'll probably put in 8GB RAM which is what I have on my main workstation and what I need for some of the scenes I render. Obviously I need a 64 bit OS. I haven't decided whether to stick with XP Pro 64 or move to Vista 64. The last workstation I put together was a dual - dual Opteron so there was a fairly short list of motherboards to choose from. I'm getting a headache spending hours comparing different options for the Q6600. Looking at the reviews on Newegg, it seems like every board / manufacturer has someone complaining about it. Any advice is appreciated. Also is there a significant advantage to a chipset newer than the P35?
Thanks,
Ben

Compared to p35, p45 overclocks better and use PCIE2.0, the later don't really matter in your case. But since it's only $99, there is no reason to get p35 over p45.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813130181

As a side note, p35 is to be replaced with p45, and going out of production soon. If you want it, get one before they're gone. Can't imagine why though.

Hi dagger, thanks for the recommendation. It looks like it has everything I need at a reasonable price. There don't seem to be many reviews around yet. I've seen mixed opinions of MSI around, though I guess you could say that about any of the manufacturers. Any suggestions regarding RAM timings, frequency?
Thanks,
Ben

For ram, 800mhz ddr2 is the best bang for the buck at the moment, timing should be 5-5-5-15 or below.

Look at the Newegg Reviews for the MSI motherboard, you will do fine with a P35 chipset or a reviewed P45 motherboard. Try GA-P35-DS3L or Asus P5Q. I think Vista 64-bit is cheaper than XP 64-bit, either way, get Vista since it's newer and performance is up to spec.

Thanks for the advice guys. Very useful.

pcgamer12 - I am leaning toward Vista for future-proofing. The one nice thing about XP 64 is that I already know my main software runs fine on it. I did see the Newegg reviews. Since there are only 2 from people who bought the MSI board, there really isn't much to go on. Unfortunately it seems like for every board theres somebody out there who had a problem with it. A couple of times I was leaning toward a board and then ran into a review that said they couldn't get it to work with 8 GB RAM or Vista 64. I guess I'll have to choose one and try.

Oh and overclocking isn't a big issue for me, but it will be hard to resist trying to get a little extra out of the Q6600 after all I've read about it.

+1 for the P45.

vista 64 is better then xp 64 and it has more drivers.

If I remember correctly, rendering is only done on CPU and is highly parallelisable, so every core it has it will user. I don't if you intend to use the PC for something else, but here is an idea for a purely rendering box: using a dual-Xeon (quad). You can get "cheap" Xeons from 230$ (2GHz) to 350$ (2.5GHz), a motherboard to support it for as low as 225$ (ex: here) and FB-DIMM RAM for as low as 140$ for 4GB.

I know it's fairly not cheap, but I think everyone would agree it will render like hell.

You can also look at this for fun .

Zenthar - yes you are right about rendering being CPU based and parallelisable (there have been some GPU-assisted renderers like nVidia's Gelato but they haven't really caught on). That's why I went with dual-dual Opterons on my last build. Anyway my current license (of Softimage XSI) allows me to distribute rendering of individual animation frames across my network. My understanding is that in this situation you would actually get diminishing returns as you go above 8 cores (4 on the old workstation and 4 on the new one). If I upgraded my license to allow rendering of separate frames across the network then it would continue to scale linearly, but that's a couple thousand dollar upgrade that I'm not ready for.
That Helmer project is very cool. Of course he's using Linux, and I think Blender so no big software expenses. Oh, and a lot more expertise than I have.