Upgrading Motherboard

Hey, I currently have a Gigabyte P35-DS3L which has served me extremely well for the last year and a half but I'm looking to upgrade it a little without going overboard and rebuilding half my system with a Core i7. Currently these are my specs

XClio Windtunnel Tower
E8400 OC'ed to 3.2Ghz with Arctic 7 Cooler

4GB DDR2-1066 G.Skill

XFX GTX260 (Not the 216 core)

1x 250GB Seagate 7200.8
2x 500GB WD Caviar IDE
2x 500GB Seagate 7200.11

This is my main storage and slight gaming machine but I want a little more breathing room in terms of SATA ports and just updated overall. I know the updated bit is vague but as of now I can't boot FAT32 usb drives and POSTing takes an eternity (Running latest stable firmware).

I was thinking along the lines of the EP45-UD3 since I'm familiar with Gigabyte and their quality. But I'd like some feedback and suggestions as to what else is a decent mid to higher range board for LGA775.

*I have no use for SLI or RAID so they don't factor in. My price range is up to $160 US.

Thanks!

Hello and welcome to the forums
I second Twoboxer suggestion,EP45-UD3 is a great choice and its a decent motherboard

Unless I had very special SATA requirements, I wouldn't bother with any extra devices.

As I said earlier, the mobo is a good choice. But I don't think its going to have a significant impact on your boot times and overall responsiveness.

I haven't checked the specs, but it looks like you're running some older, slower disk drives. That plus system age/bloat are probably the main causes.

Your E8400 is a nice processor, but what's surrounding it is holding it back. Problem is, once you replace the mobo and one or more disks (maybe a 120GB SSD for a boot drive) you're only a processor (and maybe an OS) away from a total, true upgrade lol.

In this situation, I'd recommend you consider sticking with what you have until you are ready for a cpu/platform upgrade as well.

Thanks for all the great bits of advice. I was leaning away from a sata controller because for the cost it seemed like, why not just upgrade the whole motherboard. Its been a while since I've been up on my CPU knowledge, englandr753 any news articles on the next gen platform or are you just speaking in terms of 'it'll inevitably happen'. I was under the impression LGA-1366 was here to stay for a bit as the enthusiast socket type.