Motherboard choice help wanted

[neillybob]

Help. I need a new motherboard soon. My current rig is crashing and reporting CPU speed errors

It seems to be a choice between these:

Abit IP35
Asus P5K
Gigabyte GA_P35C_DS3R
Gigabyte GA_P35_DS4

I'm leaning towards the Gigabyte GA_P35C_DS3R because it supports DDR2 and DDR3. Is this useful for future expansion?

I will be mildly overclocking an E4300

Thanks for any advice. My budget is up to £120 for the motherboard

[Dreaming]

Don't worry about DDR3 just yet. I've just got an IP35 Pro and it's a really nice stable and quick motherboard, but the Asus also has good reviews (see the P5K thread). All of them will easily do the overclocking you want from it, and DDR2 PC6400 will accomodate most of your overclocking needs unless you feel some need to push it to insane levels. (past 3600mhz by my calculations).

A crucial point you haven't included is the prices of each. I just love the Abit myself, but I've not tried any of the others so can't offer any comparisons. Just to say if you get it you won't be disappointed . Compared to my Asus P5W the POST process etc. (before it starts the Microsoft Windows loading screen) is so quick. The Asus took around 10 seconds, this takes around 4. (very approximate guesses). But that's comparing motherboards from different generations, again, I'm only giving my personal experience!

One thing, the P5K (not deluxe) doesn't come with the ICH9R chipset (just ICH9), so if you want Raid control you would need to buy a seperate RAID controller.

[Andy3536]

I have the cheapest version of the gigabyte p35 ds3 @£70 and am most impressed, doesn't support ddr3 but when you could in theory have 8Gig of ddr2 1066mhz and then tweak the voltages on them, you can see that the extra cost of ddr3 will not be worth it for a few years yet.
Can saftly say that any of the gigabyte p35 boards are very good, and the amount of people with good words to say about the asus p5 series would show that they are very good boards.