E8400 Wolfdale Motherboard Suggestions needed

[Stoney]

This isn't for me, but a friend. He lives in England and wants to upgrade from his current 939 system. He wants the E8400 Wolfdale (and nothing else will do; I tried :p ) and asks for suggestions for a motherboard.

I am woefully void of knowledge on what motherboards would work with this 45nm processor. Here are a few his parameters:

1. He doesn't/won't overclock.

2. He doen't want SLi or Crossfire.

3. He needs something rock stable; no need for all the extras or the tweaking. Stock will do him fine.

He is significantly limited in PC knowledge and that is why stable and steady is very important.

Thanks.

[Cec Britton]

I just bought that same processor and an ASUS P5Q Deluxe motherboard. It does have a lot of "extras" but the cost differential between it and a more stripped down board is almost negligible. I obviously wanted the extras so that was my decision point. I don't care too much about overclocking and its risk but I do like having lots of USB ports, Firewire ports and external SATA ports.

[Stoney]

I saw this board at a link he provided. I'll check it out.

Have you installed it yet? Is it up and running? How ddo you like it?

What RAM are you using.

Thanks!

[hockey man]

I would suggest that he looks for something based on a P35 chipset. It doesn't have all the newest glamor or extras, but it is a solid MOBO chipset that will support that Wolfdale CPU.

[Cec Britton]

It is solid as a rock and lightning fast. I have 4GB of Gskill DDR2 800 memory in it and I am back to running Vista Ultimate 32bit. I tried 64 bit for a while but encountered a few driver problems and little benefit so I am waiting a while before going back to 64 bit.

One caution I didn't mention about rigs, avoid the AMD platform and Nvidia chipset boards if you are planning on Vista in your future. That is a disaster path. I know because I've been there too!

[hockey man]

One caution I didn't mention about rigs, avoid the AMD platform and Nvidia chipset boards if you are planning on Vista in your future. That is a disaster path. I know because I've been there too!

You might have had issues with a nVidia/AMD setup- but that doesn't mean that it isn't possible! I think there were early driver issues, but that has been cleared up.