I need someone with experience in motherboards or computers?

Question

I'm undecided which motherboard i should buy and why, what are main reasons, what has more and better features and will perform better in my computer. I will use a Q9550 2.8ghz Quad Core processor with it.

Please be as specific as possible, Thanks.

Answer 1

I wouldn't buy a very top dollar motherboard, because it won't increase your PC's performance drastically.....

Save your money for a top dollar graphics card IMO.

Any motherboard that serves your ram/graphic cards need will be good enough.

Answer 2

I would say the x38 would be the practical side.  I just built my Asus P5Q-SE yesterday and I am finding out that the bios is very finicky about overclocking at all.  I spent $140 on 4gigs Mushkin DDR2 1066 and in x64bit vista am only getting 5.8 vista score on my ram.  The timings on 1066 ram are 5-5-5-15 where many brands of 800mhz the timings are 4-4-4-12 so the 800 gets the better score.  I paid $40 for 4gigs of 800mhz G.Skill to downgrade with 1066mhz.  Only thing is that the G.Skill didn't last but 3 months...  

Just a little advice on CPU differences that I have been reading on lately, unless you are just a # cruncher the difference in the Q9550 isn't going to be much at all, especially in games, you might get 1fps on the Q6600.  Tomshardware tested a INTEL skulltrail with 2 9770's and 2-8800GTX in SLI.  Then took one 9770 on a good motherboard, and 9550 and a Q6600 and a phenom 9700 and an AM2 4800.  All the CPU's did very close in gaming, within 10fps in many games.  In games there was no difference between the twin 9770's and the Q6600 or even the 9700Phenom...  Now in crunching the #'s type applications yeah the loaded skulltrail hit the wall, doubling every processor and quadroupleing the processor speed of the AM2 4800...  

I am just trying to let you know that if you want to save the extra $200 from the q9550 vs. the q6600 then you might want to put that $200 twords a 4870x2 or something...