What motherboard should I go for?

(I guess this is kindof the right section to put this in)
I'm looking for an awesome motherboard. And by 'awesome', Ii mean one that makes the Rampage III Extreme quiver.

The background:
The computer I have had since 2001 died a few days ago (see my album for the funeral photos). It was a critical death, as it seems that the motherboard shorted (I swapped most of the parts for slightly newer (2005) parts a year ago).

Currently, I am having to get by with my HP Pavilion ZV5000, which as you can see from my system specs sheet, isn't very good (let's face it, the coolest thing about it is its processor being codenamed 'ClawHammer'). Unfortunately, that laptop has more or less the same specs for any machine i've recently owned. The best machine I've ever had was the dead one that I got 2GB RAM into with the new, shorted, mobo.

I am fed up with low end computers. I plan on building the best machine I could possibly dream of (that is possible with todays technology ). The Rampage III Extreme doesn't hold enough RAM for my likings.
Yes, I realise I would need a SSD to fully justify that much RAM, and please don't try to talk me out of it saying that's an insane amount. It's meant to be an insane machine

So, the sort of mobo i'm looking for needs:
- More than 24GB RAM max. (i'm thinking more along the lines of the latest Mac Pro's 64GB)
- Standard size. I don't want a cute little HTPC mobo, I want a standard size one.
- At least 2 PCI-E slots, preferably three. I would like to be able to have the option as well for at least one PCI card to be used if I want.
- Must support an i7 extreme. I hope that all the sandy bridge mess-up has gone by the time I get round to buying all this stuff, and yes, I realise an i7 extreme costs about £995. I'm planning on saving up
- At least one IDE connector. Call me old fashined, but I like IDE.

I think I've covered every 'base' on requirements...
Yes, I realise this rig is going to cost a lot (my rough estimate is £2000). I'm saving up and want to go 'all out' this time.
Thankyou very much for reading all of this

More than 24 GB of RAM means either 8 slots or more than 4 gb per stick.

I can't find a board with 8 slots or 8 GB sticks of RAM.

Maybe a workstation or XEON board of some type. Don't know if it will fit your budget.

The Rampage III Black edition supposedly supports more than 24 gigs of RAM, but it has only 6 slots. That's only 24 gigs unless you can find sticks with more than 4 gb each.

No offense but why spend so much on something which will be obsolete in less than six months. Buy something decent and use rest of money to upgrade with time.

ignatzatsonic, thank you for your research into it. After a bit of fishing around, I stumbled across the EVGA Classified SR-2, which seems to be huge in every sense (price, size...) and takes a mind staggering 48GB of RAM and two processors. This would seem to be future proof, but with a price of just over £500, I can see Devilz' point about spending more on other parts later
How great would 24GB be? as yes, I was intending on having a high budget, but I think I ought to be slightly sensible with choices
I guess 24GB could be fine, so thanks again ignatzatsonic for the research

Well there is no Sandy Bridge extreme CPU. Don't think they're doing them for Sandy Bridge as they have the K edition ones, which are essentially what an extreme edition did.

For RAM, a few high end P67 motherboards support 32GBs, but there's no 8GB RAM sticks available yet (4GB sticks have only just really become widely available), so for now you're stuck with 16GB max on a P67 mobo. If you want more than that, then you're gonna have to go to x58, which as pointed out, the Rampage III can have up to 48GB, but again you're not gonna get this without 8GB sticks of RAM. To go higher than that, then you're gonna have to drop this whole build and go to a dual Xeon 1366 board that has 12 RAM slots and use buffered RAM, which will get you 96GB max, but that is completely pointless for a desktop, or the SR-2 which is still 48GB and uses Xeon.

I don't think you should build a comp based around how much RAM you want. The amount of money you'd be spending on RAM filling that RAM limit would cost more than your PC.

You also say the Rampage III doesn't have enough RAM for you, yet that's an x58 motherboard and you seem to be wanting a Sandy Bridge, which is P67 and a different socket, so you're stuck with 32GB max on Sandy Bridge.

Most Sandy Bridge ATX motherboards come with 2 PCI-E slots. Only a few have more than 2, and just about all have a PCI slot as well as IDE.

96GB does sound pretty sweet , but I guess I should draw the 'sensible line', as yeah, for a high grade server, maybe, but for my word processing machine it could be a bit over the top
(no, it wont be just for word processing, but I suppose 96GB does sound rather insane even for a gaming machine).
Thankyou Everlong for the further research and explanation

You do realize that adding tons of ram won't make your machine faster, right? Your system is only really going to use what it needs. Do you run heavy ram intensive applications that are really going to benefit from this? I'd be just about willing to bet that 4GB would be more than you would use/need.

You asked, "how great would 24GB be" and said, "96GB does sound pretty sweet"....but that sounds like typical, more most be better thinking. I've got servers at work with more than 32GB of RAM in them, but they run dozens of production virtual servers which run applications for hundreds and thousands of users. All of my other servers are usually 4GB or less...as more RAM is often wasted RAM. My home desktop runs 8GB of RAM as I do run lots of VM's. Without my VM's, I don't use more than about 2-3GB of RAM ever.

There will be a Sandy Bridge Extreme edition.

Due out before year end. Cost unknown, but I would expect it to be around $1000.

True.
My machine with 8GB only exceeds 3-4GB with certain x64 applications.
Even then, it doesnt use all 8GB.

(firstly apologies for no quoting, but my phone doesn't seem to like multi-quoting)

pparks1, yeah, I guess so. It's just i've never used a machine with more than 2GB of RAM. actually, I just realized, I never ever ever have :/
I thought i may have had briefly used somebody's slightly better machine, but no, 2GB is all i've ever experienced. I guess I should get the Rampage III Black edition for slight 'future proofing', but only get 8GB of RAM to start with to see how I cope. I plan on getting (in the far far future, even further away than this rig) a MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM, which when comparing it to my 'dreams' of RAM levels looks pathetic, but when compared to reality (I guess running parallels would be quite 'smooth') is ample. Considering both pparks1 and Wishmaster's real life 8GB examples, I guess it should be fine for me.
ignatzatsonic, ooh, can't wait! I suppose that is a pretty high price tag compared to my (dead) £15 Celeron D , but I'm guessing it will be an awesome processor

in response to pparks1 enquiring about 'needs', i would like to be able to run some VMs (not simulatneously though) and have a pleasant less-freezing than before Windows experience. The ZV5000 keeps displaying out of memory erros and suggesting to kill explorer :/

(and I would like to be able to game on it, but not a lot and nothing as 'demanding' as crysis 2. the odd sims 3 and GTA whirl would suit me, but when you get to 4GB+ of RAM, it starts to depend more then on what graphics card you have :/)

biggles1000 said:

in response to pparks1 enquiring about 'needs', i would like to be able to run some VMs (not simulatneously though) and have a pleasant less-freezing than before Windows experience. The ZV5000 keeps displaying out of memory erros and suggesting to kill explorer :/

(and I would like to be able to game on it, but not a lot and nothing as 'demanding' as crysis 2. the odd sims 3 and GTA whirl would suit me, but when you get to 4GB+ of RAM, it starts to depend more then on what graphics card you have :/)

Click to expand...

An i7-2600k (i5-2500k would even do), a P67 motherboard (Gigabyte or ASUS I'd recommend), 8GB RAM, GTX560 (don't use Radeons so can't really recommend any) and you're set for a while with that setup. Quite highly specced, would play any game that's out now, will run VMs perfectly well. Just throw in an SSD and a storage HDD and you're good to go.

I'm not aware of any game that will really take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM. With 8GB of RAM, i can comfortably run 3 simultaneous VM's as well as my host OS and still not run out of RAM.

I would agree with your new suspicion of starting with 8GB of RAM and see how things go. I've never once thought, "i wish I had more RAM on my home machine".

(again, apologies for lack of quoting )
Everlong, thanks for the list (it does help ). I think i'll go for Asus (as i haven't had the best joy with Gigabyte recently ) and I guess the Rampage III Black edition would suit my 'reformed' needs after the helpful explanations and example from all of you

pparks1, 3 simultaneous VMs sounds very impressive, but will it run iTunes fast? just kidding, we all know it runs faster on same specced Macs no matter what (anyone know why that is??)
I guess 'starting' (and probably sticking) with 8GB wouldn't hurt my wallet as much as my original (now apparently extreme ) system aims. I guess if I find it too slow, I can just pop out for some more RAM, but given everybody's examples, I doubt I'd ever get close to 24GB being necessary.

Thankyou all for your help and advice


footnote: I would appear to over-use smilies an awful lot. apologies if it makes all the text seem a huge yellow dotted mass (as it did to me on viewing after posting). I normally use smilies in IRC as plain text and short sentences/lines, so I never saw my over-use of them before

biggles1000 said:

pparks1, 3 simultaneous VMs sounds very impressive, but will it run iTunes fast? just kidding, we all know it runs faster on same specced Macs no matter what (anyone know why that is??)

Click to expand...

3 VM's is easy. if Windows 7 is using 2GB or so, I could dedicate 1GB of RAM to 6 different VM's and fire them all up.

iTunes? No idea there. The only way I would use that would be if Apple sponsored me. I don't own any apple products and I plan to keep it that way. My portable MP3 players are simply drag and drop. I currenly use a 16GB Sony Walkman. For my music collection and tagging, I use Media Monkey.

biggles1000 said:

I guess if I find it too slow, I can just pop out for some more RAM, but given everybody's examples, I doubt I'd ever get close to 24GB being necessary.

Click to expand...

Usually adding RAM doesn't make a PC faster unless your PC had very little ram to begin with.

re VMs
I suppose so, and I guess many OSes (esp. many linux variants) don't demand much. Being able to run 3 VMs is something that I do aspire towards with this future computer. Probably not for much use, but just to be able to go 'wow. this really IS an awesome computer'. Just out of interest, do you use virtualbox, VMWare or another?

re. iTunes. yeah, I wish I had got out of the 'apple loop' earlier. now i'm trapped with a 3rd generation iPod touch that I use for all my portable media (my phone (an htc touch pro2) is too slow). It's great for portable media, but I do wish it wasnt so locked. I haven't synced with iTunes for at least half a year, and if I do it'll demand I erase it (I use DiskAid with the FileApp Pro app and the VLC app to avoid stepping near iTunes).

re more RAM. doesn't it?? I guess I'd never have noticed, as stepping from a sluggish 512MB laptop to a 2GB tower did seem like a big boost, but I suppose when it gets to over 2GB the hard drive etc. become just-as-equal-a-factor as more RAM would.

biggles1000 said:

Just out of interest, do you use virtualbox, VMWare or another?

Click to expand...

VMWare for me. Primary because i use VMWare VSphere and ESXi at work...so I'm very familiar with it and I like keeping things as common as I can between work and home. I'm actually working towards some VMWare certification...so the more experience that I have with the product..the better. However, I do have experience with VirtualBox and it's a great product as well. My suggestion for people is to use whichever they are most comfortable with.

ah. I use VirtualBox (well, tried to, as all I could run reasonably with it on my specs was a puppy linux iso ), but i've always had problems with getting USB attachments (such as storage) to work with it (anyway, thats for another thread another time ).
From what i've seen, virtualbox is the more down-to-earth and 'does what it says on the tin' piece of virtualisation software, but (from the little i've used VMWare) it's the 'pro' choice for people who know exactly what they want to get out of it.

good luck with your VMWare certification

biggles1000
Unless you have the money now to begin purchasing I would decide on the stable constants in your build like the case, PSU and the other components that won't become old and out dated after 10 minutes of installing them. Reverse engineer your build and when you have all the money together then shop for the wiz bang mobo and processor deal of that day! Otherwise in my experience you'll just be wasting time as with 1-2 months passing the whole range of whats cool changes and that my friend is the joys of computers! But I've been wrong before and likely to be again.......lol oh and remember as I mentioned before this whole process is the real fun of the build.

Good motherboard/ram combo is your best bet. I use to have asus p4p800-deluxe with celeron D processor and 2 GB ram and it lasted for 7 years. Only thing I upgraded with time was graphics card, and it used to run any game back in 2001-2008. Then I bought my current system, which I'm using since 2009 and i'm sure it will last another 4-5 years. In future, I might go with SSD's (when they become more affordable) to increase the bootup time/application loading. Rest is good.

As mentioned, no matter whatever you do, your computer will never ever use 8GB of ram, so why waste money on getting motherboard which can run 32/48 GB of ram which is useless. Look into motherboard which can run different CPU's, so if in future you think your rig is slowing down. You can throw latest cpu and your machine is fast again