what's the right mainboard for me?

[subdude]

after having various tech troubles over the past 3 months, i now throw the main components out and update with some more contemporary equipment. i decided on the core 2 quad Q6700 with 4GB DDR 1066 RAM and a nvidia VGA. but i totally struggle with the mainboard issue. i am overwhelmed by the number of models and makes and need some advise on what model i should buy. the PC will be used for gaming only, internet or LAN is never used, normal stereo sound signal does the job for me. any advise on what i should buy? thanks for your input.

[Zachstar]

#1 Go for DDR2 ram

#2 Lan comes with almost all mobos as the connection components are at most a quarter or two these days.

#3 Most modern mobos have 5 or 7.1 sound. If you want. Some even come with HDMI so you can hook it into an HDTV!

I suggest you get an microatx board. They only have one slot for a video card. But they usually come with nice onboard graphics that you can replace later with a good video card.

Basicly lets play the narrow down game. I throw a model out and you tell me if its too expensive or you want more features.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128363

Warning! You need good case airflow for this!

The lowest limit I would say is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500018

Its very very basic and the graphics I bet cant even run SH4 very well until you put a dedicated video card in it. Tho if its the pure basics you are after this is it.

[subdude]

zachstar, thanks a lot for your help.

the RAMS are actually DDR2, my mistake. i have a pretty ok video card, it's a nvidia 8800GT something with a 512MB RAM.
i am not really on a budget, i just don't want to spend cash on features i do not use and need. the case will have plenty of cooling, since i live in a hot country i need that anyway.

[CaptainHaplo]

Do you plan on overclocking? If your not going to do so, then alot of boards are going to work for you. If you do want to be able to - you need a board that is set up and designed to accomodate that feature well. This really is the primary question when buying a mb.

[AVGWarhawk]

Personally, I like to pair boards with chip set and card. In other words, if I buy a board with Nforce chip set, I will pair it with a Nvidia vid card.

Check out Cyberpower.com. If anything, you can pick a computer and click customize. You can then see what mobo/graphic cards the recommend to pair up. You then can go buy the hardware and build yourself or just have Cyberpower do it. Also, you can do live chat with the people at Cyberpower. They will answer all your questions.

[goldorak]

First and only golden rule : when using an intel processor get a mainboard with an intel chipset.
This will eliminate in future many potential problems.
Nvidia makes good graphics cards (not without problems of course), but their chipsets are just sorely lacking. They are very costly, power hungry and not very stable, and from time to time can even corrupt data.

[Skybird]

edited, something weired happened to my posting, and the thread it was intended to appear in

[goldorak]

Skybird, a cpu dying is an extraordinarily rare event (even moreso if you never overclocked it).
If your computer is having problems look elsewhere but not the cpu.
Inspect the mainboard looking for buldging capacitors, if they start leaking you found the problem.
Do a memtest on the ram, leave the test running for sevral hours and come back. This will tell you if the memory sticks are having problem and therefore have to be replaced.
For the graphics cards, video corruption is a good indicator of gpu failing.