Is there any reason buying expansive mobo?

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exe163

[H]ard|Gawd
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I am thinking about getting a q6600 and a mobo that fits its pins. I don't know which price range I should be looking at. Base on my experience with my built around 2 and a half years ago, I spent something like 250 for the newly release A8N32 mobo. I liked it a lot, it fits nicely with 4400+. Now I am upgrading again, s939 is dead, I won't be able to use A8N32 for my new build, so much for 250 bucks.

Now I am wondering is there any reason to get a expansive mobo such as the P45 P4Q Asus board? I am pretty sure socket 775 will be outdated soon, a mobo for only a single CPU seems kind of wasteful.
 
exe163 said:
Now I am wondering is there any reason to get a expansive mobo such as the P45 P4Q Asus board? I am pretty sure socket 775 will be outdated soon, a mobo for only a single CPU seems kind of wasteful.
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775 will be superceded in under a year.
bear in mind that that single CPU can currently have 4 cores on it though.

if you upgrade every 2 1/2 - 3 years then you are pretty much going to have to resign yourself to not being able to reuse much of your previous system.
 
A nice (expensive) board means you'll get a good OC, usually SLI and reliability... IM $100 is about the min I would spend on a board... gigabyte makes nice boards... x38,x48, and G33 are good chipsets...

or for SLI 780i or 750i FTW!!!
 
exe163 said:
Now I am wondering is there any reason to get a expansive mobo such as the P45 P4Q Asus board? I am pretty sure socket 775 will be outdated soon, a mobo for only a single CPU seems kind of wasteful.
Click to expand...

Unless you want to be able to tweak and OC every once of power out of your system, need a load of expansions features or multi-GPU capability, it's a usually a bad idea to go with ANY $200+ plus motherboard. Many $100 motherboards today perform just as well as $200 to $300 motherboards. So go with a significantly cheaper motherboard if it fits your needs and wants.
 
and also it depends on what features you want. i just built my new rig about a month ago and needed Wi-fi so i spent the extra $50 to get it, plus i got some other nice things too
 
stay in the $150 range, lots of nice boards that perform just a well (they have the same chipset) without all the bells and whistles. Dont go much lower as the quad core requres a beefy high quality cpu voltage regulator circuit to feed those 4 cores. Look for heatsinks on the power mosfets or a heatpipe. Asus and Gigabyte both have nice P45 boards at that price point.
 
BUFF said:
775 will be superceded in under a year.
bear in mind that that single CPU can currently have 4 cores on it though.

if you upgrade every 2 1/2 - 3 years then you are pretty much going to have to resign yourself to not being able to reuse much of your previous system.
Click to expand...

2.5-3 years period is the time it takes for new technology to drop down to acceptable price (in this case for for Q6600 to drop in price). Personally I do not find C2D attractive enough for me to dump my 4400+ and everything else for minor clock speed upgrade. Maybe A8N32 was a mistake, there are some every nice features on I would like to take it with me, but they are not detachable :(. Do you think it's wise to upgrade to s775 right now? Or should I wait a little bit longer for the new standard?
 
exe163 said:
2.5-3 years period is the time it takes for new technology to drop down to acceptable price (in this case for for Q6600 to drop in price).
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Q6600 has only been out for ~18 months, 2 1/2 - 3 years is long enough for many things to have been obsoleted.

The new socket isn't likely to become even reasonably affordable for another year or so & will be DDR3 which currently is still pretty highly priced.
As for whether you should wait it comes down to what you feel about your present system - does it do all that you need or is something lacking?
 
I think affordable is the best solution as most gigabyte boards are reasonable and good performers.
 
If no SLI or Crossfire needed, then there are lots of boards available from Gigabyte, MSI, Intel and Asus that can be used, I prefer Gigabyte for that range.
 
Lately, I've been buying "cheap" mATX boards with onboard video. When I'm done using it for my computer, I can always recycle it into an office computer or something like that. As long as it has an x16 slot for video expansion and mild OCing (3.3Ghz on my Q6600)...why spend more unless you're looking for specific features?
 
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