MOBO & RAM with e8400 for RAID and Speed not for OC or gaming

[hrzafer]

Hi everyone;

I have been searching for hours and couldn't find a satisfying answer yet.

I decided to buy a e8400. I'm not interested in overclocking or gaming, crossfire etc. I just want speed for applications like MS Visual Studio, Photoshop, Illustrator. I usually use a bunch of heavy applications like these together. And my Firefox is always open with like 15 tabs.

I also want to do RAID 0 with two SATA HDD.

So which motherboard & RAM configration do you advise? A cost effective one please.

 

[zenmaster]

Sounds like the Q6600 would be better than the E8400

If not going to OC, then any P35 or P43 would do.
Preferablly one from Asus or Gigabyte

If going 64-bit OS, I would grab 8gb of RAM too.
Too much is never too much and not really that expensive.

 

[hrzafer]

Sounds like the Q6600 would be better than the E8400

If not going to OC, then any P35 or P43 would do.
Preferablly one from Asus or Gigabyte

If going 64-bit OS, I would grab 8gb of RAM too.
Too much is never too much and not really that expensive.

Thanks for reply.

I'm thinking to use XP SP3 32 bit for 2 years more. It's the most stable OS for me.

Do these motherboards support raid?

Also is there a remarkable difference btw. ddr2 and ddr3?

 

[Legless Ethiopian]

No there isn't a significant difference between ddr2 and ddr3 so I would stick with ddr2. Since you aren't going to overclock I was going to recommend ddr2 667 ram but I couldn't find any for a good price so I would go for ddr2 800. I would use this ram Model 996587. It runs at very low voltage and fast speeds and if you're running it at 667mhz you could probably lower timings without increasing voltage if you're interested. $42.99 after rebate for 4gb.

I agree if you haven't purchased the cpu yet I would go with a quad core for what you're doing. I do have the e8500 and its great but more cores would benefit you.

 

[hrzafer]

According to replies I think I'll go with q6600. So what do say about motherboard? Asus PQ5 seems good for me. They say it works very quite. Since it is a work oriented PC quiteness is very important for me.