Buying a Motherboard help

y2jmocho

Hi, need to buy a new motherboard so i am future proof when upgrading, the pc is mainly used to play games but i am hoping it will provide me with at least 3-4 years of gaming before i buy a ps3 or xbox 360 cheaply.
The budget is around £100.

I am currently using a Pentium 4 640 lga775 but the motherboard must also accept core 2 duo. MUST accept LGA775 socket!!!

Also using ddr2 533 but the motherboard must also accept ddr2 667 (ddr2 800 is even better).

the motherboard must aslo accept SLI since i have a 6600GT and buying another would save me money. it must accept PCI-Express.

It also must also accept SATA hard drives.

Any help is very appreciated. Thank you

CAT-THE-FIFTH

I would look at getting an Intel 975X board as the 965 series board does not officially support SLI. However the cheapest 975X motherboards that I have seen are around 130-150 pounds. Do you really need to have SLI??

I would personally sell the 6600GT while you still can and get a 7600GT instead and use a much cheaper non-SLI motherboard. My 7600GT gets around 3300 in 3DMark06 whereas my 6600GT got around 1900. You can get 7600GT cards for around 90 pounds. The cost of a new 6600GT plus the extra cost of the SLI motherboard is around the same anyway. A good non-SLI board is the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 which costs around 90-100 pounds.

Alternatively you could wait until Vista comes along and the first budget Directx10 cards start to appear. These would be more futureproof.

I really do doubt that a gaming PC today is going to last for 3-4 years without any modifications. I would give it two years personally if you have the latest hardware. In two to three years most games may need dual or even quad cores if Alan Wake is anything to go by!!

Some of the current games when run under MS Vista have shown to have improvements when 4GB(!!) is installed when compared to 2GB!!!!!

y2jmocho

Thanks for the information. What do you think about the Asus P5NSLI, only £70, its reviews gave good performance for playing games but everything else is very poor.

Also not sure what you mean about the directx10 cards, isn't this something you can upgrade by downloading or does this come with the graphics card?

CAT-THE-FIFTH

You will need to check the internet forums for any major issues but, is worth investigating any memory issues that this board may have(according to some of the reviews I quickly glanced through).

The new DirectX10 cards have new features like Shader Model 4.0 that are not available in DirectX9.0 cards. However DirectX10 only works under MS Vista!! :rolleyes:

y2jmocho

I have decided to buy the Asus P5N32-sli after christmas. hopefully the price will go down a bit. The P5Nsli is a risk, good for some bad for others, also you right in stating it has memory problems.

thanks for the help