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ChemicalWarrior · 02-24-2007, 10:40 AM

The highest end are the Nvidia 680i chipsets, they had early issues on the reference designs that have since been fixed however. With that said, I personally would not go with a 680i based motherboard unless you want SLI. Instead I would go with a P965 based motherboard, that's an Intel chipset.

My personal motherboard is a Gigabyte 965P-DS3. It is a great motherboard and allowed me to overclock my Core 2 Duo E6300 from 1.8GHz to 3.2GHz, so it has a lot of head rooom. The Asus P5B-Deluxe is another solid choice and will likely give you just as much headroom and be just as stable and solid. I would say the boards are all out of their growing pain stages, ER mentioned 975i which is actually a chipset that started life in late Pentium D and was designed to go all the way to Quad Core Core 2 Duo's, its actually getting relatively old.

The reason why you've heard of these RAM issues is because people still be to stupid and not read manual information, etc. Higher end RAM often does not work error free at stock voltages and instead the manual will say to use 2.0v instead of 1.8v. That is covered by the warranty and will almost always work. Of course there's a number of boards out there from Intel that do not allow such adjustments, so when people get that shiny pack of DDR2-1066 that needs 2.1v and the board only supplies 1.8v of course they will run into issues.

ER, I would highly suggest you do not go with a GeForce 7950GT. Either spend a few more bucks on going to an Nvidia 8800GTS based (640MB varient if you can afford or 320MB which should be about $30 from the 7950GT). Or if you do not want to spend anymore money then pick up an ATi based card from that time. The GeForce 7 series still gets on my nerves for being praised for no good reasons. They had worse image quality than ATi parts and generally in the upper end were slower. But as stated, I'd much rather recommend you a 8800 part as it will certainly give you MUCH greater lifetime on the cards usefulness, it is also a DirectX 10 part so if you move to Vista you can have that rather nice feature.

02-24-2007, 10:40 AM	#3 (permalink)
ChemicalWarrior Moderator Addict Posts: 2,051 Shouts: 0 Join Date: Jun 2005 Age: 19 Thanks: 2 Thanked 18 Times in 15 Posts Add to xFire Friends List	The highest end are the Nvidia 680i chipsets, they had early issues on the reference designs that have since been fixed however. With that said, I personally would not go with a 680i based motherboard unless you want SLI. Instead I would go with a P965 based motherboard, that's an Intel chipset. My personal motherboard is a Gigabyte 965P-DS3. It is a great motherboard and allowed me to overclock my Core 2 Duo E6300 from 1.8GHz to 3.2GHz, so it has a lot of head rooom. The Asus P5B-Deluxe is another solid choice and will likely give you just as much headroom and be just as stable and solid. I would say the boards are all out of their growing pain stages, ER mentioned 975i which is actually a chipset that started life in late Pentium D and was designed to go all the way to Quad Core Core 2 Duo's, its actually getting relatively old. The reason why you've heard of these RAM issues is because people still be to stupid and not read manual information, etc. Higher end RAM often does not work error free at stock voltages and instead the manual will say to use 2.0v instead of 1.8v. That is covered by the warranty and will almost always work. Of course there's a number of boards out there from Intel that do not allow such adjustments, so when people get that shiny pack of DDR2-1066 that needs 2.1v and the board only supplies 1.8v of course they will run into issues. ER, I would highly suggest you do not go with a GeForce 7950GT. Either spend a few more bucks on going to an Nvidia 8800GTS based (640MB varient if you can afford or 320MB which should be about $30 from the 7950GT). Or if you do not want to spend anymore money then pick up an ATi based card from that time. The GeForce 7 series still gets on my nerves for being praised for no good reasons. They had worse image quality than ATi parts and generally in the upper end were slower. But as stated, I'd much rather recommend you a 8800 part as it will certainly give you MUCH greater lifetime on the cards usefulness, it is also a DirectX 10 part so if you move to Vista you can have that rather nice feature. __________________ What could appear next?