hi,
just wondering, mobo prices mostly vary on the northbridge, x48 boards are around $300 and P35 boards are low as $80. does it worth it to spend 220$ more on mobo?? (do not minding about sli, or anything else.)

if you are not going to sli it is not necessary

if you dont overclock to high levels or you dont need duel Gfx cards then a p45 will be fine.

but i would recommend buying from the newest series, IE go for p45 over p35, and respectively x48 over x38, simpily becaseu which one do you recconn they are going to support for the longest.

The chipset itself does not directly effect performance. But the chipsets level does effect the available features such as 2 full PCIe 2.0 lanes and such.

Oh and Intel chipsets only support CrossFire not SLI.

When can you SLI on a X48 motherboard? If you won't use the features, go for the P35. I don't need RAID, nor SLI, nor Crossfire so I went with a GA-P35-DS3L.

Intel P35/45 and X38/48 boards often OC much better than nNvidia chipsets. Just check forums of people having problems OC on a 680i vs those who OC on P35 or other Intel boards.

Just make sure that you go with DDR2 for now...DDR3 might be the future, but until prices drop a lot and performance gaps widen...DDR2.

Check the number of connectors you get too, regardless of features. A GA-P35-DS3L only has four SATA connectors. If you've got two SATA hard drives, a SATA optical drive, and install an eSATA bracket, you're done.

If you have an E4400 and P35-DS3L as in your SIG, I would really avoid getting a new mobo until Nehalm is released in Sept w/ October availability.

However, you HD2600 is likely your main issue if gaming.

The chipset, and northbridge inparticular, totally effects the performance of a mobo and the computer as a whole.

On an Intel system, the northbridge controlls the fronts side bus speed and memory badnwidth. Newer chipsets/northbridges enable faster fsb and memory. Three years ago, the "best" Intel chipset was the the 875P which allowed for a fsb up to 800MHz and dual channel DDR memory. And now, the "best" Intel chipset is the X48 which allows for a fsb of up to 1600MHz and dual channel DDR3 memory. The southerbridge primarily controls the I/O of the mobo and it wasn't up until about the 86x series that SATA was even supported.

So, the chipset and northbridge are key to what level of performance you want from your computer. If you notice the X48 is labeled as an "enthusiast" chipset whereas the P45 is labeled as mid-level. Those labels are for a reason and indicative of their support and performance; for example, the P45 only supports Crossfire of two lanes of 8x PCIe whereas the X48 does a full two lanes of 16x PCIe.

It is not worth it if you dont need the features of the highest end chipsets. Lets say you built a system with a 45nm core2 some ddr2 800 and a single graphic card with no intent to ever go crossfire or sli. A 80 bucks p35 would perform basically the same as the top of line mobo. As long as you do not need the extra features/functions like crossfire/raid/more sata ports/ 2 full speed pci/ddr3 support and so on.