I want to keep all the guts from my computer and upgrade just thecpu, mobo and memoryi want to get the E8400 - what mobo would you all recommend? and how easy would it be to do this myself? I built one computer several years ago and it had its frustrating moments, but it worked well, my thing that always confuses me is what bios settings to do and what pins, on the mobo to set, etc.ciao!Brian S

With modern boards you wont ahve any pins or jumpers to worry about, I would say the best board for an e8400 is the asus p5k premium, becuase of its excelent power design, solid capacitors, and extremely high fsb clocks, topping out over x38 and x48 boards even thouh it isa p35 chipset.

On the other hand I would advise to stay AWAY from ASUS P5K series.Although the Premium model may not have that many problems, the whole P35 chipset series ASUS boards have problems starting up, strange behavior etc. I would suggest to check their forum and read about the problemsfirst : http://vip.asus.com/forum/topic.aspx?board...SLanguage=en-usI had bought the ASUS P5K and had to return it as my PC wouldn't start 9 out of 10 times.Got myself the Gigabyte P35-DS4 and I'm a happy simmer since.George DorkofikisAthens, Hellashttp://online.vatsimindicators.net/811520/1704.png

are you saying then there is not much to setting up something like that? can I just go with factory defaults and be ok?also, where do you guys order your hardware? I live in the USA and I've been going through zipzoomfly - ciao!Brian S

There are problems with every board, but I have heard only good about the p5k premium, and I own one and it has been the best board I have ever owned. You can set the factory defaults, that will usually work, but you would be missing out on alot of performance by not overclocking, and its not a scary as it sounds, you just need to know the safe limits. I order all of my parts from newegg.com when I can, I've had only good experiences with them.

After reading this I hope I don't have any probelms with the mobo I just bought last week. I just purchased the E8400 and the ASUS Maximus Formula. I just need to get the system built now. I read a lot of reviews on the ASUS Maximus on newegg.com and for the most part the reviews seemed pretty good, so I will see in another week or so when it's together.Sean

asus has no quality anymoreI suggest going with a gygabyte p35 board. very stable and very very overclockable. I know a guy who stuck a qx9650 on one of them and got it to about 4.4-4.6.I use a 780i, but since most of you are not very hard core gamers its of no use to promote it

P5K-e? I dropped in a Q6600 under a Thermalright 120 w/ 4 sticks of DDR2-800 ram. Set the bios to 400mhz FSB and Vcore to 1.4 volts. Let Otto (auto) handle the rest. Boot n' run. 24/7. Prime will run forever. I very seldom reboot. Had it running for several months now. Vista's sleep function works great. Jiggle the mouse, then from sleep to ready-to-go is 2-3 seconds. So far, no explosions ('cept me trying to land that darn P-51).