Hello. I am buying a new system in the new year, and I have chosen nearly all my parts apart from a motherboard. I am very worried that the motherboard i choose will not be compatible with all my other bits. Some feedback on my future system would be appriciated too. I have around £650 to spend, and so far am up to £535.70 Lian-Li PC-7 PLUS Aluminium Midi-Tower Case - £57.56 Corsair 1GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 TwinX (2x512MB) - £117.49 Hiper HPU-4B580 Type R 580W Modular ATX2.2 PSU - £64.61 Intel Core 2 DUO E6300 £110.44 Sapphire X1600 Pro 512MB - £82.24 Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7.1 - £18.79 Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB x2 - £61.08 Pioneer DVR-111BK 16x16 DVD±RW - £23.49 Thats what I have. What motherboard would be suitable for the componets? I'm really having diffuculty figuring out wheter or not motherboards will be compatible with system x or system y? If you could give some feedback as to wheter or not this system will be good, that would be appriciated. This is my first time, I love the idea of building my own computer, but just want to try and get the right things before I build! Cap'n M.
Abit AB9 Asus P5B Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 MSI P965 Neo-F ...plus any other motherboard sporting the Intel 965P/965G chipset. There are also other motherboards and they will be explicit on supporting Core 2 (codename Conroe) processors.
Thanks for the reply, would it be advised to buy a specific core 2 duo motherboard? And two more questions. 1. Is the case ok? or should I spend a little extra? 2. Will the graphics card be able to play games like, fear, half-life etc? Thanks. Cap'n M.
The case is fine. As long as the case doesn't have the front intake blocked off, it's fine. Just go for something you like the looks of. The video card will play those games, but you might want to seriously consider going with a the Radeon X1650XT. The rest of the X1600's are pretty weak. On the nVidia side, the GeForce 7600GT would be a good mid-range card to check into. As it is, you should be able to play most games at a 1024x768 resolution with medium detail settings.
