Forbidden Donut

If i were you I'd go for a quad core

I have an Asus P5N-E and I can't honestly recommend it. I don't mean to suggest this is a universal problem, but it doesn't seem to detect things properly all the time when I try to boot up. Mostly it gives me the BIOS post of 1 long and 3 short beeps, meaning it can't detect the memory. Now of course this may mean it's a memory problem or I don't have enough or whatever, but I'd bet money it's just a flaky motherboard. I lean towards Abit in terms of personal preference (the shit just works right), and hopefully that will narrow down your choices a bit.

In general you can't really go wrong with asus, and i too recommend quadcore unless your poor like me

I love asus always used them snice i started building computers really never had any issues /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" /> but go with quad Core

So I'm thinking I'll go with the P35 motherboard http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813131180

and with this quad core http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16819115017

and I'm assuming I will need the 650 watt psu.

All of that sound compatible?

are you sure you need 650? it sounds more like an overkill to me. 480 or 500sh might be enough?

yeah 650 sounds like a lot, but i mean, at least you won't have to worry about upgrading it again for a while.

Think the 550 psu will be enough? With a quad core intel, 8800gt, 2 raptors, another harddrive, and 2 gigs of ram?

I'm also thinking that this motherboard will be a better choice http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?...N82E16813131196

How did this turn out?

I'm trying to figure out whether I should pay more and go with DDR3 or settle for the cheaper DDR2 chipset.

u need to go gddr3 for the card. dont bottleneck the 8800gt. but if ur thinking about price, get urself a radeon 3850 gddr3 512, i did and im just ripping up shit and using 2k x 2k textures.

GDDR3 and DDR3 are two entirely different things (GDDR3 is the new graphics memory for video cards and DDR3 is the newest system memory standard for the motherboard). My dilemma is whether to get a board that requires DDR3 (which is a lot more expensive than DDR2 but will allow me to upgrade to higher memory bandwidth in the future).

Plus, I think I'm gonna wait until the Nvidia GeForce 9 series comes out to buy a video card. ATI has just had way to many troubles with their drivers to buy another one of their cards.

are you insane? i obviously thought u were talking about gddr3 because no sane person would use ddr3 right now.

let me clarify a bit. 2 things are going against ddr3 as of right now. bad timing and low bang for buck. in a brute data transfer rate test, ddr2 800 and ddr3 1333 are about equivalent. the ultra bandwidth of the ddr3 are severely limited by the high latency bottlenecking it to ddr2 800 speeds. now the craze about it is that when the memory timing and price both decreases, it will make ddr2 completely obsolete as that is the potential of the ddr3. you'd have to buy a 1600 stick to get an edge running your regular processes, which is ridiculous at around $400. right now the only reason anyone would use it is for those who use photoshop professionally or is building a video encoding machine or compiling an OS. in those memory hogging cases, the higher bandwidth is a godsend. however, for someone like you who is building a gaming rig, what you care about is latency, as the higher, the more client-side lag you are prone to. the games themselves do not use a particularly high bandwidth. The reason for this is that the major memory hogs--the textures--are almost always monopolized by your video card memory. even if your game is doing swapping, the significance of bandwidth is low. so basically, if your getting ddr3. your paying 6-7x the money for memory that will end up hurting your performance. It is better to invest in more ddr2 800s, overclocking them, and run them in parallel. not to mention a hell of a lot cheaper. there will come a day when ddr3 memory timings are able to match ddr2's, but there is significant time to upgrade then, at which point in time, the compatible motherboards and cards themselves will be reasonable. conclusion: ddr3=paying more for less until about 2010...ish make it 2012

edit: lower power consumption and heat generation means that the consumer targeting for laptops will come sooner than desktops