I'm upgrading my wife's pc, and I need some input on motherboards. I'm a tech for one of the local IT companies, and I build probably 30-40 PCs a year. I order all the parts, and assemble the machines, and 99% of the time go with Intel boards. That's pretty much the only brand I'm very familiar with.
The Asus board on my wife's s478 board is going out, so I'm upgrading her system to a C2D. Probably the E6550 or E6750. I'll be adding a 7900GT, 2GB of memory and a single HDD, and single DVD burner. This is all going in to a Lian Li PC-A05 (absolutely gorgeous case btw, this is my first Lian-Li and I'm very jealous of her new case)
My first inclination is to just order the same board we use in most of the workstations we build, the DG31PR. They're currently $80 at the egg. I am very comfortable purchasing an Intel board because of their stability, and the excellent customer service we get from Intel. BUT I'm wondering if I could save some coin by going with a different manufacturer, perhaps Foxconn, Abit, Gigabyte or DFI. I'm not as familiar with the manufacturers though, so any advice given would be wonderful.
This machine will not be OC'd. Both the HDD and the DVD are pata, so sata support isn't necessary, although I'm sure in this day and age, it would be pretty hard to find a board without SATA. I would like it to have a gigabit nic, but other than that, I'm not really sure why I would want one manufacturer, or chipset over the other.
I don't necessarily want cheap, just less expensive. I don't mind spending the extra coin on an Intel board, but if I can save $20 and still get a good quality product, I'm all for it.
Thanks in advance for any help and recommendations.
The Asus board on my wife's s478 board is going out, so I'm upgrading her system to a C2D. Probably the E6550 or E6750. I'll be adding a 7900GT, 2GB of memory and a single HDD, and single DVD burner. This is all going in to a Lian Li PC-A05 (absolutely gorgeous case btw, this is my first Lian-Li and I'm very jealous of her new case)
My first inclination is to just order the same board we use in most of the workstations we build, the DG31PR. They're currently $80 at the egg. I am very comfortable purchasing an Intel board because of their stability, and the excellent customer service we get from Intel. BUT I'm wondering if I could save some coin by going with a different manufacturer, perhaps Foxconn, Abit, Gigabyte or DFI. I'm not as familiar with the manufacturers though, so any advice given would be wonderful.
This machine will not be OC'd. Both the HDD and the DVD are pata, so sata support isn't necessary, although I'm sure in this day and age, it would be pretty hard to find a board without SATA. I would like it to have a gigabit nic, but other than that, I'm not really sure why I would want one manufacturer, or chipset over the other.
I don't necessarily want cheap, just less expensive. I don't mind spending the extra coin on an Intel board, but if I can save $20 and still get a good quality product, I'm all for it.
Thanks in advance for any help and recommendations.