I'm building a gaming PC and i need to decide on a motherboard. Someone help me out!?

Question

I'm building a gaming machine, and i need to decide on a motherboard. I've looked at two, the

. ASUS P5KC AiLifestyle Series iP35 Socket 775 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard

and the

. ASUS P5K Premium WiFi-AP iP35 Socket 775 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard

For my PC i want both WIFI and compatibility of DDR3, as you can see, one board here offers WIFI, and one doesn't. It also turns out that the board that offers WIFI doesn't have DDR3 but the board with without WIFI does... i need both, ( and of course all the latest things which a good mother board should have, E sata etc).

Due to the processor i'm getting, Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Socket 775 (3.0GHz) 1333FSB 6MB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor, i've read it requires a P35 board with intel chipset...?

can someone who knows what they are talking about, please help me out here! I'm very confused.

Answer 1

E8400 doesn't need a P35 board. Use an X48 board. I just built a rig with an Asus X48 Rampage Formula Board, 2 4870s in Crossfire and 4 GBs of Corsair Dominator DDR 2 1066. Maxes Crysis out at all very high settings. I wasn't about ready to pay a lot more to run DDR3. If you wanna build a high-end rig then wait and use a Nehalem cpu that, according to Intel, is due out some time in September and put it on an X58 board thats coming out for the Nehalems which aren't 775 cpus.

If you still wanna build a rig now go with this board:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...

Spendy but thats life if you want to use a good DDR3 board. with eSata and Wi-Fi. I suggest you read reviews on P35 DDR3 boards. For some reason the P35 chipset doesn't give you much of a performance bump using DDR3 instead of DDR2. Also runs Crossfire at X16/X4. X48 runs both slots at X16. One of the reasons I went with an X48 board. X4 and X8(P45) cant handle the massive bandwith of the 4870s DDR5 memory which I confirmed with ATI before choosing my board. Here's a review of that Asus board I suggested:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx...

Answer 2

Go to http://www.maximumpc.com they especialize in build gaming rigs for testing from cheap one to the most expensive, plus they test all kind of hardware and they give rewevs with are better.

Answer 3

Go with the DDR3 memory support. Keep WiFi as an add-on card.

Answer 4

TigerDirect has the mobo you want. The ASUS P5E3. Item# A455=2822. It has both Wi=Fi ad DDR3