As you might have guessed, I am after a nice, stable, reliable C2D mobo, but all I really know about is the top end 680i stuff, which isn't what I am after for this comp. I know what components I am going to drop in, the mobo is the bit I am getting unstuck at. It will be partnered with a E6600 running at stock, it will NOT be oc'd. I was thinking DQ6 because it's feature rich and pretty good value for money, but I know the DS3 would be fine for it. I'd say £80 is the price limit and SLi is not required. I cannot seem to find the P5B deluxe on the scan site anymore, or the DQ6 for that matter, and those would have been my original thoughts. Just after suggestions really
Intel boards like the 975X Bad Axe 2, or go to their website and look at their workstation offerings.
If you like the DQ6, then why not look at some of the other Gigabyte boards around the £80 mark. I would go for the DQ6 myself - especially if its on offer this weekend
I've built 3 machines around the DQ6, all have been very reliable so far, except for one that was DOA.
The DQ6 has suddenly become very hard to find, strange. I'll have a look at the bad axe boards bindi, I don't want to go totally work station, he does do a fair bit of multitasking and high res graphics (for adverts), but I know the intel boards are good. I'll have a browse and see what I come up with and list them here me thinks.
As far as a reliable, future-fit board goes, i can't help but praise the EVGA 650i Ultra board. Excellent warranty, excellent basic features, stable, fast stock, faster overclocked. There is a review on the main site, plus plenty around on the net, all of which backup what im saying! I'm running one with the aforementioned E6400, 6Gb of OCZ 667Mhz @ stock (plan to get it back to 800mhz), and a quartet of 160gb Seagate drives, with a trust 7800gt. Its reliable, stable, and kicks ass on XP64 as im sure it'll do on vista64 of any 64bit flavour of linux. And it'll happily take quad core, and the new 1333mhz fsb cpus coming later in the year. I'll stop raving bout the board now, i think you get the picture
Moving away from the world dominated with Asus, Abit and Gigabyte, if you are looking for a reliable workstation motherboard, may I suggest SuperMicro. It's pretty much unheard of in the gaming industry but in the enterprise industry (servers and workstations), they are rather common. You won't get any fancy colour coding or get fed with tons of features, however, if you want something very reliable along with great build quality, you cannot go wrong with SuperMicro. The PDSBE or C2SBE might be the model you want to look out for but they aren't easy to find. Prices are around £110 though.
I was thinking 650i would be a simple way to go as well, I am glad someone mentioned it. @ bbq, I can't find a P5K in any of the stores I'd want to use which is a bugger. @ tzang, thanks for the suggestion, I don't want to go *too* workstation though, I should have perhaps left that out of the description
If you ant a good reliable workstation board, then stick to Intel branded motherboards. Speak to anyone who has honestly tested Intel boards, and you will know that its the most reliable boards you can find. But don't expect any fancy features. The Gigabyte motherboards now use Solid-capacitors and Heat-pipe techonology - No fans.
P5N-E's are NOT reliable. They're flakey as hell at times. Mine took about 3 hours to get booting first time around, I just had to keep cycling power and doing random crap to get it to work. They're super duper overclocking mobos for the money but definitely do not buy one if you're after stability.
