Motherboard recommendation with 2nd gen i5, first time building

[The Geologist]

I was thinking of a 2400 or 2500K with an Asus z68 deluxe/gen3; Radeon Sapphire 6870; Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium and 16 MB Corsair Vengeance RAM.

Is this a good combo?

[32dEgReEs]

Go with the 2500K you wont regret it... as for a good motherboard i recommend AsRock, MSI, or Gigabyte through my 12yrs of building and repairing computers. Those are the only motherboard manufacturers i have never had to send off for RMA.

My current system is a 2500k with a AsRock P67 Extreme4 Gen3. Board was a decent price and has great BIOS features for tweaking and Overclocking. I do recommend an aftermarket heatsink whether or not your plan on Overclocking. I ran my build for a week at stock speeds with the stock heatsink and it would idle in the 40s and load was reaching into the 70s. After that week I was able to get some new thermal compound and put my Corsair H70 in and it idles in the mid 20s and load with it being Overclocked to 4.5ghz is low 50s. There are traditional heatsinks out there that do just as good of a job if you dont want to invest in a enclosed water system like what Corsair has to offer.

So out of everything I would recommend a different board, the 2500k, and everything else is good.

[Flyin Brian]

I quit using anything but Asus around 15 years ago... never had a reason to switch since then.

[Hoop]

Buddy and I were talking about this the other day. We've both been building computers for ourselves and friends for 10+ years and we came to the conclusion that when it comes to gaming the vid cards is the most important part with a good hard drive in second place.

FWIW I like asus mobos and evga/xfx video cards

[JDay]

Buddy and I were talking about this the other day. We've both been building computers for ourselves and friends for 10+ years and we came to the conclusion that when it comes to gaming the vid cards is the most important part with a good hard drive in second place.

FWIW I like asus mobos and evga/xfx video cards

Sorry but if you have a cheap motherboard you will not have enough bandwidth on the PCI-E bus for the video card to run at full speed. Your motherboard is the heart of your system. Hard drive speed also does not matter much for gaming, the only thing a fast hard drive will do for gaming is decrease level load times. Once a level is loaded the hard drive is barely used at all. A quality PSU is another important component since having a cheap generic one can cause instability problems and has the potential of killing the system.

[Hoop]

Sorry but if you have a cheap motherboard you will not have enough bandwidth on the PCI-E bus for the video card to run at full speed.

Never seen or heard of that before (my post only had 3 lines in it and the word cheap was never mentioned either). Maybe if someone tried to use a really old chipset to crossfire or SLI a pair of new cards. Also 'levels' don't instantly load with a lot of games particularly open world ones but that's not what I meant by 'good hard drive;' you want one that will last.

Power supplies are a crap shoot. Buy a good brand and cross your fingers imo.

[JDay]

Never seen or heard of that before (my post only had 3 lines in it and the word cheap was never mentioned either). Maybe if someone tried to use a really old chipset to crossfire or SLI a pair of new cards. Also 'levels' don't instantly load with a lot of games particularly open world ones but that's not what I meant by 'good hard drive;' you want one that will last.

You can get two motherboards that have the same chipset yet have a different amount of bandwidth available for the PCI-E bus. Not to mention the difference in the quality of the capacitors (most common point of failure) used between different models.

Power supplies are a crap shoot. Buy a good brand and cross your fingers imo.

Nope, there are brands that consistently make quality power supplies. I.E. Antec, Corsair, PC Power & Cooling, Delta.

[Hoop]

You can get two motherboards that have the same chipset yet have a different amount of bandwidth available for the PCI-E bus.

Alright I see what you are getting at but that really isn't a problem graphics-wise. That is a peripheral 'problem' (not really a problem at all and you won't notice it unless you look for it).

Nope, there are brands that consistently make quality power supplies. I.E. Antec, Corsair, PC Power & Cooling, Delta.

I've buried two antecs, had a corsair die on me and exploded a cooler master. Corsair sent me a replacement and I ebayed it, Antec took forever to replace one and Cooler Master never replied to my email

[Wherryj]

I quit using anything but Asus around 15 years ago... never had a reason to switch since then.

ASUS makes some good products, but their customer service is quite lacking. I've always been quite pleased with eVGA. They're a bit pricey, but make a very solid product and have bullet-proof service.