Choosing mid range LGA1156 mobo & RAM

[tjgraf]

Hi Foks.

You were right. Once you build your own, you’re hooked with the quality and flexibility. Not to mention the knowledge you have of what’s going on inside the box. :D

Last year I built 5 of the budget build plus style with i5-750 / Gigabyte P55-UD3R mobo, 4 mb of Gskill Ram, WD Caviar Black 640’s or 1 TB’s (two in RAID 1, an easy way to back up) EVGA GTX260 video, 1000 W Rosewill supplies from 2009 Newegg black Friday fame. All are running perfectly assembled in Antec Solo cases all driving single Samsung 23” or 24” screens.

Now I’ve got a son getting into the tax business full time so I’m giving him my year old box, and I’m building myself a new one. This should be fun! I do general internet surfing, some word processing, not any gaming. But I hate it when I open a graphic and my video drags. Stability and reliability are paramount.

Trying to determine the right LGA1156 mobo and amount of RAM for my use.

I already have the following equipment:

1 WD Caviar Black 640
1 Antec Solo case. These are solid boxes, with no covers on the CD drives which I like. Also very understated styling.
1 Antec Earthwatts 650W PSU
1 i5-760 I bought on sale yesterday (1/7/2011) at Newegg (still on sale though the weekend) so I’m committed to LGA 1156
1 Sony Optiarc DVD RW. These have worked flawlessly for the whole family over the past year.
1 Gigabyte GT 240 (GV-N240D5-512I) that I got on sale for around $50 or $60 after rebate last spring. It’s not nearly the EVGA GTX-260 that I used last year, but I’m going to experiment with it this time around to see if it will be good enough for my use, which is not intense, but has to deal with a single 24” diagonal screen.
Win 7 premium 64 bit

I’m looking at Gigabyte mobos, and would consider an Asus.

Which of these two Gigabyte mobos do you all like: :confused:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128412 or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128425

Can they be used to drive HDMI type monitors if I decide to go that way in the future?
Or does HDMI only depend upon compatible video boards?

I’m looking for an ATX size board, don’t care about 1394 firewire (I’m not a big Apple guy). Is there an ASUS mobo I should consider instead? I really liked the dual bios in the last 5 Gigabyte mobos I built around. I could flash the BIOS and not worry about board damage. Or does Asus have this feature also? Asus has so many more boards that are 1156 based. What options do they offer for a non gamer that Gigabyte does’nt have?

How about RAM this year. :confused: Does it still make sense to go with 4 mb? Or is 8 mb better for “future proofing”?

I'd appreciate any other thoughts you may have about what I'm trying to put together here.

[tjgraf]

Hi all,

Did more research last evening both on this forum and on the Gigabyte web site. A few observations and thoughts:

1) On the choice between the two Gigabyte motherboards I am trying to choose between, I found this comment from Daneb on a thread in early December that stated the following about the GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3 LGA 1156 Intel P55 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard:


SATA 6 Gbit/s is actually called SATA 3 or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment 3. It’s the third revision of the standard that replaced those god-awful 40 pin cables we used to use. What we currently use is SATA 2 which moves data at 3 GB per second or 3000 MB per second.

The only time the hard drive can communicate with the motherboard at these speeds is when data is being moved in an out of the cache RAM in the hard drive. The largest amount of cache RAM available in a hard drive right now is 64 MB. So at 3000 MB a second the transfer would take 0.0213 seconds at SATA 2 speed. So the difference in time between SATA 2 and SATA 3 is 0.01066 seconds. In order to take full of vantage of either SATA 2 or SATA 3 the buffer memory in the hard drive would have to be volatile memory of at least DDR-2 800 speed with some sort of battery backup. If the buffer is non-volatile flash memory I believe it wouldn’t be fast enough to utilize either standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive

Memory speed in MB / sec:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3_SDRAM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR2_SDRAM



Back to my commentary. Does anyone remember back about 15 or 20 years ago when IBM was touting their “Micro Channel Architecture” on their PC’s? It was supposed to be the killer feature that everyone coveted. But what did it really do for you? After it was debunked, it was proven to be a lot of hot air. Is that what this SATA 3 is now? Or is it something that will benefit me if I hook up a SSD in JBOD with my Caviar 640 black to improve boot speed? That brings me to item 2.

2) One thing that happens in my life at times, is I forget to complete an MP3 download before I race out the house at 6 AM for my hour commute. An hour in the cold black abyss inside the cabin of my 2004 Cavalier without an updated set of MP3 files is sheer boredom and waste of brain time before work. My job is such that I can afford to be 10 minutes late and I don’t get shellacked, so I hop back on my old Dell XP laptop, wait for it to boot again, plug in my Sandisk Sansa, and download the MP3’s that I want to listen to that day. But what a pain!

What I’m doing here is making the case to go with that SSD to house Win 7. So which one, and what size is the reliable, stable, screaming unit to get? Yes, I know it will be expensive. But I’m really considering it now. An SSD would truly speed system startup, and may actually use some of that 6 GB/s.

Only problem is, if you go to the Gigabyte web site and compare the two Gigabyte boards I refer to in my first message, if you go with the SATA 3 board, if you enable SATA 3 for a HDD, it halves the performance of the X16 video board slot to X8. Not something I’m aspiring to do here.

So, back to my initial question about ASUS. If SATA 3 will really improve performance of an SSD, then is there an ASUS LGA 1156 board that will give me both SATA 3 and a full speed X16 video slot?

Or, will SATA 3 only give a marginal system speed improvement with an SSD versus SATA 2?

Thanks in advance folks, for any thoughts you could provide.

[tjgraf]

I guess I should be referring to my desired motherboard as P55 chipset, a subset of LGA1156.

Here are two ASUS motherboards that have SATA 3 that I'm comparing to the two Gigabyte boards above:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131634

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131621

[RickyTick]

What I’m doing here is making the case to go with that SSD to house Win 7. So which one, and what size is the reliable, stable, screaming unit to get? Yes, I know it will be expensive. But I’m really considering it now. An SSD would truly speed system startup, and may actually use some of that 6 GB/s.


You should read through this article.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/19049

This is currently on sale at Newegg for $490 with free shipping. Even though this is an excellent price, it's still hard to justify.

[tjgraf]

Thanks Rick,

I'll look it over this week.

I had more of a dual JBOD in mind, with a small SSD for the main drive and 640 or 1 TB for 2nd drive.

TJ

[tjgraf]

OK, I jumped on a Newegg price decline this week and bought the Gigabyte GA P55 USB3 mobo after reading the article on the 6 Gb/s SSD and amazing myself at the price. It seemed like you are blazing a new trail with that SSD, and I'm not one to do that.

I may still do a "slower SSD", but please help me pick RAM. I down loaded the Gigabyte approved RAM list and found this RAM:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231189

Read some articles on RAM selection and one point was made: if you don't overclock, don't waste money on anything faster than 1333 memory. Is 1333 the speed, or is 10666 the speed?

The price of this memory is less than half of what it was a year ago. Amasing! So cheap, I'm toying with buying 8 Gb rather than 4. Any issues to be concerned about with buying 4 sticks of this stuff rather than just 2? As i recall, last year you were saying there may be issues with too much RAM?

[RickyTick]

That's excellent ram. At that price, I'd be tempted to buy 2 kits too. Don't worry about the overclocking stuff.

[tjgraf]

OK, folks. Here's what I've got, or is on the way from Newegg:


Motherboard: Gigabyte GA P55 USB3 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681312i8425

Processor: Intel i5-760 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115067

RAM: 8 mb total of G Skill in four 2 mb sticks http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231189

HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black 640 GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319

Video board: Gigabyte GV-N240D5-512i http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125304

DVD/CD RW: Sony Optiarc AD-7240S which I bought about a year ago and not sold anymore, but similar to the AD-7260S http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319

Power Supply: Antec Earthwatts 650 Watt ATX12V v2.2 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371015

Case: Antec Solo Black with silver front panel http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129018

Now on to SSD. I'd still like and SSD. Something that will house Win 7 Pro 64 bit, and I'll use the WD Caviar black 640 for file storage. What is a good mid range SSD that will be reliable, not be too cramped for the "storage" of Windows OS, but still allow for any OS "expansion". Does the OS expand over time, with use? I'm guessing that it does, but honestly, I don't have any idea how big the minimum SSD drive should be. Is anything available like this in the approx $100 to $200 range that fills the bill here?

[RickyTick]

Look at these...
under $200
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167031
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148361

over $200
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167035
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148348