- Mar 21, 2004
- 13,576
- 6
- 76
I am looking for a motherboard for an E8400 processor. I don't want either SLI or CF, but I am willing to buy a board that supports it (and just not use it) if needed.
But what should I choose?
I am keenly familiar with the AMD motherboard offerings but rather clueless about the intel ones.
It is my understanding that P35 motherboards are all around good, obsoleting older designs (especially with their 100$ price tag). But what about DDR2 capable X38 motherboards? how do they justify the extra 120$ or so over the P35?
I also currently have 5 hard drives. A SATA raptor (OS drive), and two SATA RAID1 storage arrays (500GB and 750GB).
I have created those arrays on an nforce4 motherboard, moved them to an nforce 2 motherboard, then to an nforce570ultra... every time I just had to plug both drives in and enable raid in the bios for it to auto detect the arrays (compared to raid5 arrays which were a huge pain, and had more risk of loosing my data then a lone drive).
So Basically I HAVE to have 6 SATA plugs on my motherboard (1 for the DVD burner as well). And I would really like for them all to be working off the chipset (not additional controllers, those are trouble) and support for RAID1. I know that intel supports it, but I wonder if transferring the array would be as painless as it was transferring it between nvidia motherboards.
If it allows you to take a single drive and convert it to a raid1 array by duplicating its data unto a second drive it will be sufficiently painless.
Even before I go into overclocking I noticed the following things:
1. The only nvidia intel offerings with 6SATA plugs are the 680i SLI and the 780i SLI... so thats 230$ minimum cost there. not pretty.
2. Intel has the ability to combine different south bridges with the same north bridge, this is confusing. What are the different ones? unlike the easy to read and understand chart put forth by nvidia, I cannot find any direct feature comparison between the intel southbridge chipsets.
Ok, I have found out what seems to be the answer to my problems. The ICH9R southbridge. That has 6 SATA2 off of the southbridge. combined with a P35 north bridge I get a very attractive overall package.
How would you rate this motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813128050
But what should I choose?
I am keenly familiar with the AMD motherboard offerings but rather clueless about the intel ones.
It is my understanding that P35 motherboards are all around good, obsoleting older designs (especially with their 100$ price tag). But what about DDR2 capable X38 motherboards? how do they justify the extra 120$ or so over the P35?
I also currently have 5 hard drives. A SATA raptor (OS drive), and two SATA RAID1 storage arrays (500GB and 750GB).
I have created those arrays on an nforce4 motherboard, moved them to an nforce 2 motherboard, then to an nforce570ultra... every time I just had to plug both drives in and enable raid in the bios for it to auto detect the arrays (compared to raid5 arrays which were a huge pain, and had more risk of loosing my data then a lone drive).
So Basically I HAVE to have 6 SATA plugs on my motherboard (1 for the DVD burner as well). And I would really like for them all to be working off the chipset (not additional controllers, those are trouble) and support for RAID1. I know that intel supports it, but I wonder if transferring the array would be as painless as it was transferring it between nvidia motherboards.
If it allows you to take a single drive and convert it to a raid1 array by duplicating its data unto a second drive it will be sufficiently painless.
Even before I go into overclocking I noticed the following things:
1. The only nvidia intel offerings with 6SATA plugs are the 680i SLI and the 780i SLI... so thats 230$ minimum cost there. not pretty.
2. Intel has the ability to combine different south bridges with the same north bridge, this is confusing. What are the different ones? unlike the easy to read and understand chart put forth by nvidia, I cannot find any direct feature comparison between the intel southbridge chipsets.
Ok, I have found out what seems to be the answer to my problems. The ICH9R southbridge. That has 6 SATA2 off of the southbridge. combined with a P35 north bridge I get a very attractive overall package.
How would you rate this motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813128050