Much ado about nothing? Mobo help...

[Cur]

Hi folks, long time lurker herebut not a lot of posting histroy. I'm a 36 y/o electrical engineer, who loves to game. Hoping to get some advice from those of you that have "been there, done that".

I'm in the midst of a new C2D system build and have come upon the old "Which mobo do I buy?" question. A little background on what I am building towards, mainly a gaming rig. I'm looking to OC to around 3+ GHz, 2x2Gb of DDR2-XXXX RAM, 8800GTX (only a ~25% chance I will ever go SLI), some flavor X-Fi, big case, good air cooling. I've got "decent" oc'ing experience (starting in the days of Celery 300A's and BH6's) so I'm not scared off by a little tweaking. I am not really budget constrained, but I am bang-for-the-buck conscious.

I really like the BadAxe2, for it's reputed stability and all around ease of use (plus Intel-on-Intel can't go wrong), but I love the idea of unlinking the FSB and memory bus speeds for the 600-series nVidia chipsets. It is this feature where I am hung up.

My crux is this... Am I making too big of deal of this one feature? It just seems so great and increasing the flexibility and ease of oc'ing that for whatever reason, I can't get past it.

Thanks in advance for you thoughts and opinions.

 

[Surferosa]

I'm in the midst of a new C2D system build and have come upon the old "Which mobo do I buy?" question. A little background on what I am building towards, mainly a gaming rig. I'm looking to OC to around 3+ GHz, 2x2Gb of DDR2-XXXX RAM, 8800GTX (only a ~25% chance I will ever go SLI)...

I really like the BadAxe2, for it's reputed stability and all around ease of use (plus Intel-on-Intel can't go wrong), but I love the idea of unlinking the FSB and memory bus speeds for the 600-series nVidia chipsets. It is this feature where I am hung up.

With the knowledge you obviously have, you will be able to acheive +3Ghz with either chipset providing you choose correctly. Firstly, make sure you get some decent ram in there (PC6400 preferably), and secondly buy a board within the chipset with some nice overclocking features. Get a decent cooler, and your pushing 4Ghz.

Personally, i'd go with the 680i becuase of the potential to run the fsb at 1333Mhz.. which should be future-proofed for next-gen Intel chips.