Spec me a motherboard please

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15 Aug 2006
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Hi,

I'm having a bit of an issue finding a motherboard to do what I want. I'm looking for a board to fit the following requirements:


  • On-board graphics
  • Minimum 3x PCI-E x8
  • Intel Gigabit LAN or at least 1 PCI-E x1 slot for an Intel card
  • ATX is fine
This board will be a replacement for my current socket 775 board. CPU wise i'll get what ever is the cheapest I can put in the board. Memory wise probably put in 16/32GB. I need the 3 pci-e slots as I use 3 Dell H310 cards.


Any suggestions would be great!


Thanks
 
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OP
Joined
15 Aug 2006
Posts
67
Sorry I should have said the system is just a file server. It won't be doing any transcoding etc..

Currently specs are:

MSI P7N SLI Platinum
Intel Q6600 @ 3.2 - Custom water cooling loop (spares from my two other systems)
8GB DDR2 Corsair Dominator
PCI Matrox Mistique 2MB GPU
PCI Intel Gigbit NIC
Enermax Galaxy 1000W PSU
120GB Kingston V300 SSD - OS
3x Dell H310 SAS Controllers
24x 2TB-3TB Hitachi 5K3000/7K3000 & WD Reds
Lian-Li v2100+

Reason for the change is when I swapped out the PCI-e Intel NIC for the PCI version to put in another H310 the LAN speeds dropped from an average of 89MB/Sec to 29MB/Sec
 
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That is the thing, I don't know what CPU as it will depend if its an Intel or AMD board that is recommended. A cheap ivybridge CPU appears to be easiest route though. I've not looked at cpu's or boards since I bought a Q9550 and GigaByte x46-dq6 when they first came out around 2008!
 

los

los

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What about processor? As you can't spec a board without a processor in mind?
Your better off saying that you need a processor and board and you have £300 to spend, then people can advise accordingly.
 
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You have a speciality project which gives you cost and age issues. I had my ASUS P5N32-E SLI MB go down last spring which has an Intel Q6600 and 4GB of Ram. I replaced everything including the PSU. Except the CPU which I knew was good. It came down to the Motherboard in the end so I had to go to EB** and purchased one off of there. It works fine and though works fine with Windows 8 as well. I just felt theat after all that getting back to a working system I wanted to upgrade.
I purchased a new case, a Motherboard CPU and Ram on a Z77 chipset with an i7 3770K. Funnily enough the setup came with a DOA MB but because it all came in one package I had to return the whole setup. A week later the setup I currently run arrived and was installed into the case again. I have had relatively little trouble with Motherboards until recently, but my ASUS P8Z77-LX, Intel i7 3770K and 16GB of Ram are working fine in Windows Vista 32 bit, Windows 7 64 bit and Windows 8.1. This time I have all my Operating systems on SSD's which works fast for even the slowest of Operating systems.
I just hope you can find the right way of going about this. If you have backed up your data you can go for an immediate upgrade, but sometimes it is easier to find an identical board to fill in until you have saved for an upgrade.
I had my Q6600 system since 2006 and had no issues until last summer. Get an idea of what you want to do and plan ahead. This way you should not have any compatibility issues.
 
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Only board I know of that would give you 3 pci-e x8 is Asus z87-WS, but it cost around 240-250£ so you'd have to stretch your budget a bit.
Check the specs at Asus site, I am sure that is the motherboard you'd want.
It has a whole lot if workstation motherboard features, including dual intel i210 lan and xeon cpu support.
 
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