Looking for a solid stock board for a E6600

M

MartinX

One Hour Martinizing While You Wait
Joined
Jan 23, 2003
Messages
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I haven't upgraded my PC for a good while now and my A64 3800+ is looking a little long in the tooth for some of the games coming up, I'm more or less totally out of touch with which boards/manufacturers are on top of their game (I have favoured Asus products in the past, but for all I know they've outsourced their QA to Walmart in the last two years or some shit).

So I'm looking to build a new gaming PC, which will probably be based around an E6600, Budget isn't really an issue, but I have a strong aversion to paying for stuff (Read:Gimmicks) I don't need, these are basically my requirements:

Strong, reliable performance at stock speeds (only slightly interested in overclocking but stupid auto-overclocking apps definitely unwanted).

2-3 sata connectors (I will not have more than 2 HDDs, or more then 1 optical drive, and I don't give a crap about RAID, so 16ports and 32 raid controllers would just piss me off).

1 network connection.

Some USB2 ports, (don't really need more than 4).

Indifferent to on-board sound (it will be disabled in the bios pretty much straight off the bat).

Don't really care about sli or crossfire, but if it's got to be there I'd favour SLI.

So yeah, pretty much a solid, no frills mobo, that will get the best possible performance out of the CPU, RAM and GPU at stock speeds and won't break down because of/ need drivers for, "Mega-ultimate-super-sparkly-feature-XXXtreme".

Does such a board exist?

If so who makes it and what is it's name (note: any board with more than 8 random numbers, letters and/or symbols in the title, and/or the words "Deluxe", "Extreme" or "Ultra" can be excluded)?

"Thank you" in advance for any constructive suggestions.

Creative flames also gladly accepted.

*edit* It will also live in a case with no windows, so it does not need to be "Pimp".
 
Ruling out "Deluxe" etc. may not be the best idea, since a lot of the time, using the Asus P5B as an example, the Deluxe version has far superior cooling over the stock models.

Anyway, enough of that. I would suggest either the Asus P5W DH Deluxe or Intel's Bad Axe 2, which, i'm afraid, does have a lot of 'random' characters in its model number. Those 2 are prime contenders due to their popularity and stability, which i'm sure a lot of people can back me up on.
 
I'd also have to suggest Intel's 'bad axe 2' but as previous poster stated it does have alot of numbers in the name D975XBX2, though they are not random, 975 chipset for example, etc.

Edit: it also has extreme series in the name too, but I sure would not hold that against the board.
 
How abt the Gigabyte dq6 rev2 (was running rev 1 before) on an intel P965 chipset, no sli, none of the fancy lcd POST screens, uses solid capacitors altho the benefit of that is debatable, runs slightly cooler stock compared to another newer P965 board....the asus commando at least in my case, bios has matured, rock stable, more than decent oc's benchmarks frm the reviews (i run stock), only thing to look out for is the crazy cool heatsink at the back of the mobo which practially rules out the use of an aftermarket hsf, but its removable.
 
baboonpkt said:
I'd also have to suggest Intel's 'bad axe 2' but as previous poster stated it does have alot of numbers in the name D975XBX2, though they are not random, 975 chipset for example, etc.

Edit: it also has extreme series in the name too, but I sure would not hold that against the board.
Click to expand...

Yeah the whole naming thing was mostly me being facetious, it's just that having scanned over list of motherboards they all seem to have names more like serial numbers, I mean how do you even ask for a GA-K8N51GMF-9-RH in a shop? They might get confused and give you a GA-8I945GZME-RH by accident. :p

(I can tell at a glance one is AMD the other Intel, but those are frankly ridiculous names for a consumer product).

Based on further exploration (leading from the ones already mentioned) - the ASUS P5B-E seems to be pretty close to my original spec as does the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 and maybe one or two of it's successors.
 
cablesguy said:
How abt the Gigabyte dq6 rev2 (was running rev 1 before) on an intel P965 chipset, no sli, none of the fancy lcd POST screens, uses solid capacitors altho the benefit of that is debatable, runs slightly cooler stock compared to another newer P965 board....the asus commando at least in my case, bios has matured, rock stable, more than decent oc's benchmarks frm the reviews (i run stock), only thing to look out for is the crazy cool heatsink at the back of the mobo which practially rules out the use of an aftermarket hsf, but its removable.
Click to expand...

I have the [H]Enthusiast review of that open in another tab :).
 
My vote would be for the DS3. I have it and like it. It was also the easiest overclock I've ever done. I've got my e6300 running at 2.8GHz. 400 x 7. All I did was increase the memory voltage by .3volts.
 
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