Windows 7: Best motherboard for gamer who doesn't overclock?

Get the board I have in system specs

Here in the US the board you are using is getting difficult to find anymore; I agree it was and is a dam nice board as long as it is a revision 3.

Yep, just checked and they are scarce.

I'd get a Z77 board.
Newegg.com - ASUS P8Z77-V LK LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
Heres an example

can get the delux version of the p8p67 still but other versions seem difficult to find.

ivybridge is the successor to sandybridge, the i7 2600 is sandybridge and the i7 3770 is the ivybridge version.

Would the difference between the 2600k and 3770 (not k) be significant enough to warrant a 30-40$ higher price?


Also, I've passed over this motherboard over and over

Amazon.com: ASUS P8Z68-V LX Intel Motherboard LGA 1155 Z68 SATA 6 Gb/s and USB 3.0 ATX Intel Z68 ATX DDR3 2200: Computers & Accessories

Would this be good for me? I passed on it earlier as it says it has no PCI 3.0 slots, but then realized my Pegatron thingy now doesn't have PCI 3.0 slots, it seems... I tried searching for a comparison of this model with the Gene-Z, with the specific "LX" ending, but no forum threads had comparisons with that one, only with all the other sub-types, like "M" and "PRO" and "V"

If you want PCIe 3.0, you need to have an Ivy Bridge Processor.

Personally, if I was just building a gaming machine,
I'd get a 3570K, Z77 Mobo, HD7950, 8GB of ram.

I would not recommend an upgrade from the 2600K to the 3770K.

The board you are looking at there from Amazon will take the Ivy bridge processors but you will have to have a Sandy bridge on it to flash the BIOS to the newer 3000 series BIOS to support Ivy Bridge.

With that board I would just get the i5 2500K processor and then put the savings towards a nice GTX550 or GTX560Ti video card; then you will be sitting in the cat-birds seat with a darn nice system without breaking the bank.

[QUOTE=Personally, if I was just building a gaming machine,
I'd get a 3570K, Z77 Mobo, HD7950, 8GB of ram.[/QUOTE]


Yes, that would be a really nice gaming machine but it looks like the OP is trying to keep the price down the best way possible and still have a decent gamer.

My biggest concern isn't so much fast-ass gaming, able to play Battlefield 3 or Skyrim on max settings all day, but more sort of the playing a game in windowed mode while multiple IE windows are up and such. As it stands, my comp was quite good at that (and still is) but the amount of memory that gets used up along with another thread I started months ago involving my video card constantly crashing and recovering, there'd seem to be some hardware problem or inadequacy at fault. I don't so much want a fast graphics machine so much as a fast processing machine

OK, then go with the suggestions I offered in the above post. The 2500K is a great gaming processor and a 100bucks cheaper than the 2600K and with that you can pick up a new GTX550 card.