I'm thinking of building a secondary system to run as my entertainment center. I've been out of the loop for a while, so time to catch up.

I need a good suggestion for a decent MB and Memory.

Already got the E6300 CPU. I'm eyeing at the Abit AW9D-MAX (for 190) and the 2GB PQI Turbo PC2-6400 (for 220).

Purpose: Stable System running 24/7 OC to about 2.5-2.7ghz.


What do you suggest for a $400 MB and RAM? Don't worry about the rest. I got enough cooling, power plant and video/audio graphic card to make it a decent system.

Thanks a lot.

 

I did some reading, so slowly catching up to date.

I think I'm aiming for the Asus P5B-E Board and some B9 rams

I may have to return the CPU for better one

 

no system is stable and overclocked, yeah the test numbers may be nice but the actually throughput of the system with precision is probably downgraded.


just remember to make your ram speed a harmonic of the FSB... upgrading to 800mhz ram is useless with a 1066MHz FSB as most of the time it's not in sync.

 

Another possibility Im opening u up to is an Xbox... the old version... modded as an entertainment center...

Post the link in a bit.,..

Edit::
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/

 

running an XBOX as an entertainment center is actually a very smart idea. you can get it to do just about anything you want, and since there are OS's out there that are made spec for this purpose it might be a smarter option.

 

Make sure you read the manual for the MoBo and get Ram that is approved for it, otherwise you may have problems, Kinston or Crucial has a liftime warrenty if is is a supported brand

 

Thanks guys:

Sherwood: I'm well aware of the fact that I want to run 1:1 ratio between the FSB with the Ram's clock. That's why I was looking at RAMs that have D9 chips. I've seen people running 6300 at 3ghz stable at 1K+ FSB. D9 will allow me to run tighter timings as well.

The reason I chose the P5B-E is because of the chipset that allow me to run 450FSB stable (given proper cooling and stablized voltage.)

I've been using the modded Xbox for my MCE but they're getting slow and limited on this I want to do

BetterBob - Kingston is a very stable RAM. However, they're not OC friendly. Crucial is one of the great RAMs for OC. I was looking into Cosair, Geil, OCZ, and couple others as well. As I said, I'd like to make this a smart purchase.

But damn, I didn't know that they jacked up the prices of DDR2 rams that much. I originally wanted the E6300 but realized that I may be power hungry and the multiplier will be the bottle neck. So I may opt out for the E6400 instead.

 

umm, i kinda have to agree...you dont need an overclocked coputer just to play dvd's and shit.

with the amount of money, you might just be better off with the xbox 360 option.

just for shits, what is your video card that you plan on running?