Is it worth buying a premium board for no-gaming?

This is a solid board :

ASUS P5QL/EPU LGA 775 Intel P43 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

By negative reviews, did you mean Newegg? If so just FYI most of those negative reviews are non-sense and are posted by un-educated users that should not be near a PC in the first place.....

There are many chipset to choose from.
Choose a mainstream chipset that has what you need. Extra ports may come in handy if you upgrade later.

http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/chipsets/index.ht...

Best to stay with the 4... chipsets, more modern.
3..., 9..., G3... are kind of old.

Hi, thanks for the reply.

Yes - by negative reviews I meant NewEgg and to be honest I was very surprised to find so many "Cons"...

Anyway... the concrete Q is - if i go with Asus P5Q Premium - am I making a good choice in terms of durability and stbility od should I go with Gigabyte. (If so - which p45 Gigabyte MoBo would you suggest?)

many tnx

I would not get the premium, specially if you dont game... it would be a waste of money and on top of that it has several issues....

Here is a list of boards that you can look at... in my honest opinion you will not find a better board than the one I posted above for your specific needs... stable, durable, bug-fixed (compared to the premium), Ram compatibilty is second to none.... to many pros to list...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=E...

BTW the Biostar T-Power is one of the best LGA 775 boards out ATM, but it leans more towards gaming....

I like the Gigabyte boards. I have 4. Three are OC'd. One is a pure vanilla system. They have worked flawlessly. CPU's are 2 E5200's (one OC'd to 3.75 GHz), a Q6600, and a Q9550.

I think the quality control is a little better than the Asus boards. To be fair though, I have to admit the evidence for that is largely anecdotal.

For Gigabyte, I'd recommend the GA-EP45-UD3L if you need 6 or less SATA ports.

I see, only one problem w/ that one - no ICH10R and this is important for me as data-protection is a priority, RAID1 is a must.

BTW, just to clarify - the fact I don't game doesn't mean I don1t want a kick-ass MoBo. As I said above, I wanna have the system running reliably for 4-5 years... don't mind paying 100É more to get a good board.

So, if P5Q Premium is an over-kill, how about P5Q Deluxe, seems like a good board to me... and reasonably priced?

the L model is not available at the moment at store where I order, how about EP45-UD3 (what's the difference?)

Well there is no reason to pay the premium for a gaming board if you will not use the extra features....

If you need an ICH10R then the only board I can recommend is this :

BIOSTAR TPower I45 LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

I am not familiar with gigabyte's LGA775 boards so I would not know....

Thanks, will check it out!

Gigabyte makes some solid boards. Check out some of their ultra copper boards.
I have an inexpensive one, check my system specs, and have been very happy with it. And the performance I get from it is outstanding, really amazing for a $70 board. Fast, stable as hell, and booted first time, everytime. I myself have gone away from ASUS a few years ago. I don't think they build boards nearly as well as they used to.
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/FileList/WebPage/mb_080924_u...

As I read those reviews and forums, more and more I have a feeling I'll be opting for Gigabyte instead of Asus...

OK, let's approach this from a logical viepoint... Form follows function, right? The 'heaviest' app that you mentioned is CS4. From personal (and professional) experience, this app loves cores first, and RAM second. So, I'd be looking for an x58 board with 6 DIMM slots. The other bits are up to you, you know what you need better than anyone else here.

You didn't ask, but I'll voice a few other opinions. Gigabyte boards are good, but their customer support is not. If you are comfortable with that, then they do make good boards.

As to graphics, obviously you aren't going to get a Quadro. So I'd suggest that a 4870 1GB will do you just fine. The 4850, IMO, suffers from lack of DDR5, and the 4890 is a bit of overkill. Nice GPU, I just don't think you'll see any more 'bang' for what you say you do.

Ok, my .02...

^My 2 cents.....and this is what happens a lot on this forum. Croc is suggesting a platform for a first class i7 rig, with a pretty high end gaming card. Now what he is suggesting no doubt is a very nice rig, but...
Since you state you are building on a Core processor, the X58 chipset is out of the question-wrong platform. You also don't need a high end gaming card.

What you need is exactly what you said, a decent stable middle of the road board.

Photoshop likes quad cores and memory, a fast hard drive... it does not need a high end video card at all, any modern 512 meg mid range card, for instance something in the range of the 4670 to 4830 is all you will ever need.

Several MS office apps open at once, (excel, word, Access) full version of Acorobat, email, internet, File maker Pro....I do all that at work everyday with a 7 year old 2.0ghz P4 /512 meg of memory/ Gateway. No problem. (Acrobat will slow it down if the file has a lot of color pages) I do have Photoshop and several other programs like Quark Express, Indesign, Illustrator and they will really slow it down, and are tough to use on it, but you can do it in a pinch. We have a couple of newer PCs and Macs sitting right next to me loaded with just about every design program you can think of....so I just slide over and use them if I need. But bottom line, Microsoft apps and email, internet etc are not what I consider heavy multitasking items. Any generic Dell, HP, Gateway,cheap home build will handle all of that, and maybe even using Photoshop casually, no sweat.

When you load up Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign, and the full version of Acrobat 9 all at once, now you are multitasking and that is when a fast quad, lots of memory, and a couple of fast drives on a solid motherboard really starts to pay off!

This is exactly what I ment, these are the apps I run + MS office and IE and a dozen other...

IMHO, i7 based system is overpriced compared to gain I'd get. The i7 w/ 6GDDR3 would give me only marginal imrovement over C2Q9550 w/ 4G DDR2, but I'd have to pay about 300$ more.

The video cards you mention, are great gaming cards, but an overkill for what I need. I'm pretty sure the 4670 1GDDR3 would suit me perfectly...

Here we go , you cant find a better deal $/Perf. ATI HD 4870 for 116.99$  

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

+ S.T.A.L.K.E.R is included and the cooling fan is a good custom one+  

Powercolor? No thanks..... That is the main reason it is priced at 116.99....

If you want a real GPU with a REAL warranty get this :

XFX HD-487A-ZHFC Radeon HD 4870 1GB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

144.99 + free shipping + double lifetime warranty = no-brainer .....

BTW that Powercolor is the 512Mb version, not 1GB.....

"...and work a lot with Adobe CS4 suite – photo, video editing, etc… "

That was what I made my recommendations on. If a time savings of 10 to 30% in those apps isn't worth a few extra dollars, then so be it. If you think that a 4670 GPU will be OK for you, then so be it. I have no dog in this race, so I personally don't care.

I agree, the 4670 is weak, you can do so much better for pennies more....

A good 4670 will cost you a good 100.00$ after shipping

A kickass 4870 1GB will cost you 145.00$ free shipping

The performance gain and future-proofability = 100%

+1 if you can afford it. XFX has the best warranty in the market for ATI Cards, BFG only make Nvidia cards .