Was thinking about the above to complete the upgrade. The ASUS Extreme MOBO has water cooling facility, is it advisable to use it or can i just continue with air cooling ?
AMD or Intel ? Im thinking Intel Quads as read better reviews ?
DDR2 or DDR3 ?
Gaming is my priority, thank you for your opinions and advice, much appreciated
The Asus maximus formula instead of the Asus maximus extreme. The Asus Maximus extreme took a bit of a beating in this months ‘Custom PC’ magazine motherboards review.
Personally id go with Intel, though with the new AMD chip coming out it maybe worth having a look at it.
If money is no object then go with DDR3
If you do decide to go with the DDR2 option then it’s £194.24 inc VAT at ‘microdirect’
If you want an alternative to the Asus Maximus, then sticking with the Asus theme how about the Asus P5K3 Deluxe WiFi Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
It got good reviews. The only downer as mentioned in another post recently is Asus’s customer support. Or rather customer non-support.
And yeah it was the phenom, my heads like a pickled onion tonight, must be the stresses of work.
You gave him a p35 chip board though, he was looking at an x38 (better.) Personally, I would wait untill the new x48 chipset comes out, then upgrade. It will support the new processor on the 45nm die wihtout having to overclock.
I have looked at the X48 but this isnt due for release until Q1 2008 which could be 4 months away, im not known for my patience unfortunately, money waiting to be spent.
Hmmmm dilemma now, do i try and wait ? I wish there was a firm release date as opposed to Q1 2008 !!!
Struggling on with a P4 3.6Ghz and 3-4 yr old MOBO at mo.
I would go for DDR2 because DDR3 is way too expensive and its not such a great leap in performance from DDR2. Plus your going to get 4GB of DDR2 which is better then 2GB of DDR3.
See, you are correct with what you say at the moment but my concern is that DDR3 will overtake DDR2 (just as DDR2 did DDR) so if im going to upgrade and spend money, im thinking look to the future, why cant things just be simple.
Payday tomorrow so one way or the other a new MOBO is being ordered.:doh:
Well thats up to you i was just giving you an option. You can buy your self a Mobo that is compatible with both DDR2 and DDR3 so you can buy yourself cheaper DDR2 and when DDR3 is more avialable and cheaper to buy then you can sell your old DDR2 and upgrade to DDR3 thats just another option you may consider.
Quite a few mobos do this a good example of this is the Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R it has three slots for DDR2 and three for DDR3
I’m not very knowledgeable when it comes to computers but one would assume if its crossfire then you can’t do SLi. The X38 chipset is better then the 680i because it’s new technology (supports 45nm) therefore it’s more future proof and plus the X38 mobos have larger FSB so therefore you can overclock more.
That rig of yours is cool but please tell me how far you overclocked that Q6600 too? and is the the 95Watt edition or normal one? because I’m thinking of getting that CPU.
That was OCed via the auto OC in the BIOS of the MOBO. read the review below, i havn’t tried OCing it yet manually, want to make sure its stable as standard, which it appears to be. Read Below, they use my MOBO & CPU Combo.
Im well happy with it, Crysis & COD4 play like a dream now.
