SLI is pointless to consider unless you have money to burn (better to
get a Roth IRA IMHO). A 550 watt PSU with greater than 80% efficiency
would do just fine for what you want. Apparently my fellow listers
haven't been reading too much about P35 and DDR2/DDR3 support. P35 is an
excellent chipset but only slightly superior in performance to 965 with
current DDR3 sticks. Second, the pin count between DDR2 and DDR3 while
being exactly the same have a different notch. Therefore, you either buy
a mobo that takes DDR2 memory knowing that you can never upgrade it in
the future to DDR3 or you buy a DDR3 mobo knowing that you can't use
DDR2 and will pay a serious price penalty for it. Finally, it seems that
Kingston and not Crucial makes the fastest DDR3 memory @ the present
time. Dude, P35 will not give you any future proofing unless you bite
the bullet and get a mobo with DDR3 memory slots. So, how much money you
can afford to spend is the most relevant question @ this point. Oh yeah,
most reviews have Gigabyte mobo's rated best for Intel CPU's.
Joe User wrote:
Hello Hayes,
Monday, July 16, 2007, 3:20:58 PM, you wrote:
P35 is the only way to go. It has ICH9 which is the fastest southbridge to
date. In addition to DDR3 support, it's memory controller has been tweaked
to surpass the performance of older chipsets even when using DDR2.
SLI is still immeasurably stupid. 8800 GTX's and Ultras are cheaper now and
the prices keep falling.
Yeah I'd rather run one video card. Esp, where one card can ruin two
in SLI.
So looks like so far we have:
P35 Express chipset board
E6850 (3.0GHz) dual-core
DDR3 Memory
8800 GTX or Ultra nVidia card
Anyone make a call on what brand I would pursue for P35 chipset?
I would probably take crucial memory since I am setup as a reseller.
Who makes decent nVidia cards nowadays? I am using a MSI @ the
moment.
Antec PSU? Wattage?
