What is do you think of this board?

[Guest]

GA-G41M-ES2L gigabyte board
http://www.gigabyte.us/Support/Motherboard/CPUSupport_Model.aspx?ProductID=3022#anchor_os

i am going to breathe some much needed life back into my socket 775 pentium 4 extreme 3.73 ghz ht, paid a fortune for and it still does me good even in modern games, problem is the memory is ddr2 533 mhz and not dual channel and only agp graphics. the board has dual channel ddr2 at 800mhz and supports 1066 oc. (does that mean i have to overclock the ram to that or can i buy straight 1066 ram?) and pci express 2.0, and the deal breaker was how many processors it supports, the last of the pentium 4s, pentium 4 extreme , celeron d, pentium d, and the most recent of core 2 duo and quad even extreme editions. i would even go as far to say it supports 99% of all the socket 775 procs, except xeons of course. so it gives me tons of leeway to upgrade to a core 2 qx9750 some time after prices fall. i will be pairing this with corsair xms 2 ddr2 800 ram, a ocz modular 500w psu, and using that nvidia 7800gt oc i bought before i was computer literate and didn't know pci express from agp. i will be using windows xp home as it is cheaper than pro and i dont need remote desktop and i cant use my hp restore disks because of a non hp build.

 

[o1die]

I would sell your current cpu, even though it's worth less. If you want better performance, get some low end core2 duo or even the new i3 or i5 and do a proper upgrade. Microcenter has the 530 i3 for only $99.99 and was even allowing online purchasing a few minutes ago, but the price and availability could change any minute. The i5 boards start at $89.99 at newegg, and 4 gigs of ddr3 corsair is around $94 shipped. Fry's had the 5200 core 2 duo with board for $49.99 after $10 rebate recently. It would have worked with your old ram, and run circles around your old p4.

 

[jsc]

It's a good economy board, best suited for low end CPU's with relatively low FSBs and high internal multipliers such as the E5200. If you decide to get one of these, do not bother with anything better than DDR2-800 RAM.