I am buying my first mobo and need some advice

Hi, I see alot of Dell and Intel motherboards at a good price but, are they as good for gaming and run as cool of temperature as ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ect……? I also have to run my graphix card from onboard power from the PCI-e slot, not a 4 or 6 pin cable from the PSU. Please give me some advice for a first time builder. Pentium D 2.93GHz LGA 775 DDR2 TY, christopher

Neither Del nor Intel make their own mobos. They will be no-name Chinese brands. Probably nothing wrong with them, but as a home builder you will get more features from a "brand" which are also made in China. As a home builder myself I'm probably biased.

Why not DDR3 if you are building a new PC?
My DDR2 MSI board is fine for gaming but it's getting a bit long in the tooth. If I was building new, I'd go with a board that can handle Direct-X11 (DD2 will only handle Direct-X10). Then you would need a modern card that will handle that too. I have an old card, a 1GB 9800GT which although it's old it is a very powerful card that will play any game on the market today. I'm waiting for more games that run Dirext-X 11 (there is only a few so far) before upgrading, but if I was building new now I'd go DDR3.

Running onboard Card power from the PCI-e slot is fine as cards are becoming a lot more power efficient. My 9800GT version does exactly that.

Make sure you buy a case without a PSU (they are mostly junk PSU's) and fit your own decent quality one, especially if your a gamer.

Cheers,
Lee

to be honest i'm a bit confused/concerned.. if your building your first computer, are you using parts from your old pc and that's why you want a 775 ddr2 board?? did your old motherboard fail? if so are you sure it was the board and not the cpu? i'm assuming the Pentium D 2.93GHz is out of your old motherboard, just concerned you don't waste money on a part that may not be of any use. as far as intel boards go yes they are fine, no idea about dell's. of course they are not going to be as good as a more expensive board, but like everything in life you get what you pay for. whatever board you decide on visit the makers site and make sure it supports the cpu and ram your going to use.

hi terry, yes I am using my old ddr2 memory and 775 LGA processor. I don't know how to tell if its a bad processor or motherboard, but I need to upgrade the motherboard anyway because it can't run PCI-e @ x16 mode only x4 mode. When I boot, nothing buut a black screen and a curser appears with the PCI-e graphix card. With my old AGP card I can only get into my bios. So if i can still access my bios then my processor is still good rite? or does that mean that my motherboard is still good but just can"t run the PCI-e card at that bandwith. BTW i do have a nice 600w PSU. Tell me about chipset southbridge ICH 7 compared to ICH 10 what does this do? thankyou for advice.

like everything with pc's over time things get better faster adds new features, support, etc, so here's a link about ich:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_Controller_Hub

if you can get into the bios both motherboard and cpu may be good,

but i'm even more concerned and a bit confused now from what you've said..

does your motherboard have both a pci-e and agp slot? (honestly don't remember ever seeing such boards) can you post it's make/model number.

if not how did you insert a pci-e card into an agp slot/motherboard??

do you know the difference(looks/size) between the pci, pci-e and agp slots?

yes the problem with the pci-e card may well be it just won't work in an x4 only slot but i thought it should so not 100% sure now, maybe x16 cards only work in x4 slot when used for sli/xfire.

if you just want to upgrade your motherboard so you can use pci-e x16 graphics card then that's fine, just make sure it is a pci-e graphics card you have bought.

first thing i think i'd do is check all your old hardware(except the pci-e card of course) works fine, if it doesn't find out exactly why not, then when you get the new motherboard you'll know everything should work.

Hi terry, I have an AsRock motherboard with both AGP and PCI-e slots. The last thing my computer did was prompt me about a malfunctioning AGP something. and then froze up after I was using some very labor intensive programs all at once.

ok good luck with your new build.

yes the problem with the pci-e card may well be it just won't work in an x4 only slot but i thought it should so not 100% sure now, maybe x16 cards only work in x4 slot when used for sli/xfire.

16x = 8x