I like ASUS motherboards. I don't have personal experience with that board. ASUS is a tier one, largest motherboard manufacturer in the world. If you are a tweaker, that likes to make minute settings for the memory, get the DFI. If you want the best overclocker, from the reviews, I would get the ASUS. I have an ASUS board and like the fairly frequent BIOS updates and they have a good forum to ask questions and get answers.

Like I said, overclocking Quads to extreme speeds is not as easy as Duos and all that memory is going to make it even harder. One of the best overclocking forums I know of is here. Some motherboard threads can go for hundreds of pages so be prepared to spend some time here.

http://www.overclock.net/

Thank you taking a look on the site right now. It appears one of the members from London has the GTX 280. I think I will definately wait and see its benchmarks? Does anyone btw recommend the best pound for pound value graphics card on the market at the moment?

How rude of me forgot to post the link.... heres the link: http://www.overclock.net/hardware-news/339793-vr-zone-gtx-280-gpu-z.html

The best value bang for the buck would have to be the 8800GT 512Mb. Tom's can go into more detail.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-cards,1942.html

Agreed on Asus boards. The Rampage would be my select. Everyone probably has their favorite based on experience.

Just a suggestion. Rather than overclock the Q9450 that has a locked multiplier at 8X, why not get one of the faster quads? OC'ing the Q9450 to that speed with a locked multiplier and 8 GBs of ram sounds a bit scary, but maybe seasoned OC'ers here can confirm if it's a problem.

For the OS, if you're intent on 64-bit, agreed Vista is better than WinXP (with the stuff turned-off).

For all other components (case, sound, etc.) I'd go with stuff suggested earlier, especially the PS. Whatever you end-up with make sure the video and power supply are listed as working together. Mostly it's an SLI compatible list, but doesn't hurt to know NVIDIA has tried a specific PS with their cards. http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_build_psu.html

Thank you guod for that link, I have bookmarked that as I will need to buy a very good power supply. Maybe I should only use 4GB of DDR2 when overclocking. I have never overclocked before but I am a fast learner. From what I have read online the Q9450 will go to 3.2 without an increase in voltage. Any help on the matter would be much appreciated?

Thank you again.

4Gb will be easier to overclock. Even some boards overclock better with certain slots filled like mine. Also, general rules for overclocking are the higher the multi, the easier it is to overclock. One of the reasons for this is FSB changes are more fine with higher multipliers so you can reach the limit easier without overtaxing your memory. Also higher multipliers give you the option of lowering the multiplier and raising the FSB to jump over FSB holes. Most motherboards will have certain FSB holes where they simply won't run.

Like my E4400. It runs at 2.0Ghz stock with a 10 multi. By simply raising the FSB from 800 to 1200 and leaving the multi at 10, it runs at 3.0Ghz easily. But getting above that leaving the multi at 10 is difficult due to FSB holes in the Nvidia 650i chipset.

I can lower the multi to 9 and raise the FSB and achieve 3.3Ghz with 1.45 vcore though easy enough. With a lower multiplier CPU, this would not be possible. So I would not want a CPU with lower than a 9 multiplier, especially if I want to overclock to the max. Multis of 11 and 12 would be even more desirable for an overclocker. Also Nvidia chipsets don't depend on dividers. You can run the FSB for the CPU and the memory pretty much independantly, giving even more leeway when overclocking.

One of the Quads overclocking problems is a motherboard that can supply perfect, clean power to the quad when overclocking. Low end motherboards just can't do this.

Again, there is absolutely no reason to turn anything off on a modern system like that. 0. None. Stop spreading misinformation.

Hi,



Certainly a right answer (coming from Rilex it's must be right)

But on another point of view (gamers .. principally) it's sometime .. cause rendering problems in some games .. this option must be turned OFF if you don't want suffer of graphics glitches..
EG : for FSX (many articles about the prob in the dedicated forums Avsim .. Flightsim .. etc...)

OFF

Weird_Crapolla, when Vista sees you're running an OGL/D3D game, it turns Aero off automatically.