Asus motherboard? -- never again!

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 02:06:25PM -0400, Jose wrote:
> Mmmm, that what I thought, but did not know about the intel chipset bug.

It isn't a bug.  It was designed with 32 address lines.  It's a limitation
of the design and entirely intensional.

> Not meaning to kidnap the topic, What would be a good model to buy these  
> days, I am also shopping for a new motherboard, and was thinking of a  
> intel- core 7 or quadcore as they are becoming cheaper, any suggestions?

Well last year I built a machine for my wife using an Asus P6T with a
Core i7 920 D1 stepping and 3 x 2GB G.skill DDR3 10666 ram.

Very happy with the result so far.

A much cheaper option that is available now but wasn't when I built that
machine is a Core i7 using one of the P55 chipsets rather than the rather
expensive X58, using dual channel rather than tripple channel memory.
Tripple channel probably really isn't doing any real benefit until you
move to the 6 core (rather than 4 core) version of the i7.  You can get
those now of course, assuming you thinkg $1300 for a CPU is reasonable.

The P7P55D line looks nice at the moment.  Some have dual gigabit
ethernet, some have one.  Some can run SLI some can't.  Some have 2 PCI
slots some have 3, with a similar but inverse change in number of PCI
express slots.  Some have firewire.  Some (the -E versions it seems)
have USB3 and SATA 6Gbps ports available (not convinced either is that
big a deal yet, but still nice).  Prices seem to range from $135 to
about $235 depending on the features.

A core i7 860 (quad core + hyper threading at 2.8GHz) goes for about $300.
A core i5 750 (quad core at 2.67GHz) goes for about $225.
A core i5 660 (dual core + hyper threading at 3.33Ghz) also goes for
about $225.  Slightly more clock speed, but less cores.  Depends on the
work load which makes more sense.

Add whatever video card you like and a case and a decent power supply,
and some disks and maybe 2 x 2GB or 4 x 2GB ram, and you are all set.
4GB sticks still seem hard to find.  Check ram on the motherboard
compatibility list just to be sure.  Never buy DDR3 ram that requires
more than 1.65V if using an intel core i3/i5/i7 CPU.

If you just want cheap, you could drop to a core i3 with onboard video,
but I tend to ignore that option.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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