PC Upgrading

[Brammers]

Right, my main PC desktop seems to be dying. Last month the SATA controller on the motherboard packed up, so that it couldn't see any of the hard disks. I put in a replacement SATA controller, and everything was fine again.

Now last night, the on-board NIC packed up, but I had a spare NIC lying around, so I stuck that in. It's working fine, except under Windows 7 64bit as the PCI card is at least 10 years old, and there are no Windows 7 64 bit drivers.

So I'm thinking it's time for an upgrade the motherboard before the motherboard gives up completely.

Now this is when I turn to you! What's good out there for motherboards ,chipsets and CPU's these? The budget isn't a major issue, but I don't need any fancy extreme gaming motherboards that has (say) SLI.

[CMaster]

As ever, Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/us/) provides a pretty comperehensive set of benchmarks - their "top graphics cardfs for the money" articles. And hey look, they have a "top gaming CPUs for the money January 2010" (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gaming-cpu,review-31791.html). The new intel i5 series looks pretty nice, but a bit pricey at the moment

[Mr. Kassad]

As ever, Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/us/) provides a pretty comperehensive set of benchmarks - their "top graphics cardfs for the money" articles. And hey look, they have a "top gaming CPUs for the money January 2010" (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gaming-cpu,review-31791.html). The new intel i5 series looks pretty nice, but a bit pricey at the moment

I am an Intel + NVidia supporter BUT even I admit that Tom's Hardware is bribed by Intel. Everybody knows. (ignoring the general flamewars about what is better and whatnot)

Just my 5cents before I leave this thread forever... (oh please let this not become a Intel / AMD or NVidia / ATI fight...)

[extract]

Just my 5cents before I leave this thread forever...

literally haha

[SizZLeR]

My personal experience with mobos is, that just about anything will do, however ive had bad experiences with ECS, like ctrls suddenly quitting or getting bad, BIOS backup not working properly so u'd have to setup BIOS from scratch now and then and a few other minor flaws here and there.

Anyways ive been running Gigabyte for quite some time and are very satisfied, i sold a bunch of them to customers and none returned and no complaints.

They seem to be really stable and comes in all classes (w/ and w/o Sli etc) and therefore in all priceranges.

Usually they support up to 8 or 16 GB or ram and has plenty of SATAII ctrls as well as USB ports, gigalan etc.

Ive been running win XP 32bit and Vista 64bit with mine for a couple of yrs and never had any problems whatsoever. :)

[MrTrip]

I've never had problems with AMD + NVIDIA. Seems to work very nicely together.

My system stats are on the Linux in NC Wiki page.