Hi,I am a house builder about to retire after 40 years on the tools and finally building my last house for wife and I. My other passion I have dabbled in is Flight sim since Bruce Artwick days. PMDG are my love, but need a great computer to fly them as they were intended.I am pretty well sorted(I think)on the components for the computer, just not the Motherboard. My build plan at present is to build a machine which I can OC to some point that the machine is still VERY stable. Some of you guys seem to have this well under control? When I finally get machine built and running, OC will be my next learning curve.Build Plan.....Use my Armor+ case(lots of fans in it)WIN7 64BIT Home premiumIntel i7 2600k8GB(2@4GB)DDR3 1600 RAM (CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9)Other recommendations? I suppose depends on what MB I eventually end up with.Corsair power supply (AL-CMPSU-850AXAU) May go to 1000W, though I do not intend to use Sli for video card.Gigabyte (Nvidia) GTX 580 1.536GBCorsair Force Series SSD Boot Drive (AL-CSSD-F120GB3-BK)Corsair Force Series SSD FSX Drive (AL-CSSD-F120GB3-BK)2x500GB HDD from present machine for data2xDVD drives from present machineMotherboard???Was looking at Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7-B3 Motherboard, but now seems to be non production/delivery, well here in Australia.Wondered about the ASUS Rampage series.Looking at the signatures for a lot of you guys, I see many different MB, but I am sure you have been down this road and worked out what MB suits what CPU etc.Any help would be greatly appreciated Regards

Hi Geoff, I use the Asus P8P67 Pro motherboard with an i5-2500k. Got it finaly clocked stable on 4,6 GHz. I can highly recommend this board. It´s not that expensive and a really no-brainer. Does what you want it to do.

I switched from a Gigabyte P67A-UD5-B2 to an Asus P8Z68 Deluxe. I have not had a chance to really push my chip or my memory yet, but so far the Asus board has been more trouble free than the Gigabyte. I have not experienced a single quirk yet, actually. The EFI bios is really cool and feels very stable - no weird flickering like I experienced on my UD5. Taking screen shots in the bios simply requires having a flash drive plugged into one of the USB ports. I also really like the fan control that's allowed on the Asus. I've got a CPU fan header and two chassis fan headers that all ramp up and down with CPU temperature. I can even use the AI Suite tool to customize the fan profiles. I had no major issues with my Gigabyte board, but I never could get it to overclock any memory regardless of what voltage I fed it. The Gigabyte had a couple other quirks including keyboard incompatibility while in BIOS. None of these quirks were really a big deal, but I'm just surprised at how trouble free the Asus install has been.

I just purchased the ASRock Z68 Extreme4 board based on recommendation by Toms Hardware. I will have to advise once I get it all assembled but as it is a sub company of ASUS my guess is the performance will be very similar the ASUS board.Mark.

Hi Geoff, I use the Asus P8P67 Pro motherboard with an i5-2500k. Got it finaly clocked stable on 4,6 GHz. I can highly recommend this board. It´s not that expensive and a really no-brainer. Does what you want it to do.

@ Superpilotv2 What is your Vcore and the VID of the CPU and temps idle/full load just curious here?

Hi,I am a house builder about to retire after 40 years on the tools and finally building my last house for wife and I. My other passion I have dabbled in is Flight sim since Bruce Artwick days. PMDG are my love, but need a great computer to fly them as they were intended.I am pretty well sorted(I think)on the components for the computer, just not the Motherboard. My build plan at present is to build a machine which I can OC to some point that the machine is still VERY stable. Some of you guys seem to have this well under control? When I finally get machine built and running, OC will be my next learning curve.Build Plan.....Use my Armor+ case(lots of fans in it)WIN7 64BIT Home premiumIntel i7 2600k8GB(2@4GB)DDR3 1600 RAM (CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9)Other recommendations? I suppose depends on what MB I eventually end up with.Corsair power supply (AL-CMPSU-850AXAU) May go to 1000W, though I do not intend to use Sli for video card.Gigabyte (Nvidia) GTX 580 1.536GBCorsair Force Series SSD Boot Drive (AL-CSSD-F120GB3-BK)Corsair Force Series SSD FSX Drive (AL-CSSD-F120GB3-BK)2x500GB HDD from present machine for data2xDVD drives from present machineMotherboard???Was looking at Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7-B3 Motherboard, but now seems to be non production/delivery, well here in Australia.Wondered about the ASUS Rampage series.Looking at the signatures for a lot of you guys, I see many different MB, but I am sure you have been down this road and worked out what MB suits what CPU etc.Any help would be greatly appreciated Regards

Settle myself for the Asus p8p67 3.0 rev 3.1 :-)

@ Superpilotv2 What is your Vcore and the VID of the CPU and temps idle/full load just curious here?Settle myself for the Asus p8p67 3.0 rev 3.1 :-)

Thanks for this Steffen,Corey,Mark and Andre, Seems so far the ASUS P8 series seems most popular. Be interesting to see how the ASROCK Z68 goes, as they get a great write up. While requiring a decent speed of 4.+ some thing, stability and recovery, if it all goes wrong are paramount. I notice the ASUS P8P67 PRO has the TPU technology, which to non meddlers like myself, seems an ideal way to get the speed up into the 4's, while remaining stable. Not very adventurous, but will get me underway. Looking in the various forums, some people either love or hate the P8P67 MB. Biggest gripe especially the slow posting, and the BIOS losing its way. I suppose depending on what combination of CPU,RAM,PSU, all MB can have issues. Trick is to find the most robust MB.You can get some very expensive MB, such as ROG series. Do I presume these are for OC meddlers(oops... fiddlers sounds better) who need to get to every aspect of the MB. I prefer the more automatic route...Regards

I think the majority of "mobo problems" are actually memory problems.

I think the majority of "mobo problems" are actually memory problems.

Just curious, would you mind elaborate on that?

I don't have any solid proof or in-depth knowledge. But I've read countless threads where double booting, for example, was solved by trying a different set of memory. That and my previous Gigabyte P67A-UD5 was particularly finicky with memory.

OK I see what you mean.One should always look for memory compatibility related to the MOBO in the memory support list just to make sure.

I just purchased the ASRock Z68 Extreme4 board based on recommendation by Toms Hardware. I will have to advise once I get it all assembled but as it is a sub company of ASUS my guess is the performance will be very similar the ASUS board.

That board is my plan. I'm kind of waiting for the Corsair H100 radiator to be released which I want to try out for it. Also on the fence about SSDs.scott s..

@ Superpilotv2 What is your Vcore and the VID of the CPU and temps idle/full load just curious here?

I´m currently on stock speed cause I don´t want to stress the CPU when it´s not necessary. FS9 works with 3.7 GHz as well as at 4.6. But maybe I crank it up, settings saved in BIOS. I´ll report back.Back again at 4.6 GHz :-) A short prime95 test gave me a Vcore of arround 1.328 - 1.344 V. VID??? What´s that? I´ve never heard of that. Btw. the temp´s were arround 64-71°C.

That board is my plan. I'm kind of waiting for the Corsair H100 radiator to be released which I want to try out for it. Also on the fence about SSDs.scott s..

SSD - as a practical solution.... no. lol - even though I own one. The value isn't really there at present, especially from a price standpoint. Don't get me wrong, I love having my Mushkin 120GB. I did another load test of FSX. Fresh bootup, loaded into Windows7. Started FSX and didn't touch anything until my default flight loaded (KJKJ default C172 VC, UTX USA + GEX NA + FEX 4096). 25 seconds on the dot. Now this is with lower LOD of default 4.5, but still - that's fast.But it's not much faster than two speedy 7200rpms in RAID0. I think SlickNick says his loaded in 35 seconds or something... So I paid $225 for my Mushkin and about $109 for my 1TB Samsung spinpoint F3 32mb cache lol... FSX is the only thing that runs on the SSD.