Motherboard: Intel d975xbx or intel d975xbx2 ?

He has: 286 posts

Joined: Mar 2003

Hi,

I plan to build a basic business PC, not a gamer or a heavy graphics PC. I plan to install software like MS Office, PaintShop Pro, Dreamweaver, Quicken and that's about it. I want to use the Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 or E6600 chip. (My current Pentium 4 PC is 5 years old and runs very slow now, especially on the Internet.)

After several days' research, I've come upon two motherboards that I 'm interested in using for my new PC: The Intel d975xbx or d975xbx2. They vary greatly in price: The first goes for about $94, while the second goes for up to $523! Why such a difference?? Is the second one for games?

Thanks, as always,

Roy

They have: 32 posts

Joined: Jun 2009

I would say that the second board is definately more geared towards gaming, or server build.

I have looked up the info, but can't find any on the second board.

Usually, a gaming specific board will be SLI compatible (have 2 PCI-express slots for video cards).
A server type board will tend to have dual (or more) CPU sockets, amongst other things.

Basically, for a general everyday PC get the cheaper one - any dual core computer should suffice for everyday needs.

davecoventry's picture

He has: 112 posts

Joined: Jun 2009

I would say that, for everyday computing, anything around 1.6 GHz (which is the minimum entry level today) is more than adequate. Go with the cheaper board IMO.

The PCIe story is interesting.

I had to set up 8 ship simulators which needed a 3x 24" flatscreen monitor configuration and I would have thought that the dual PCIe slot motherboards would have been fine for this. However, it appears that the SLI configuration is solely for one of the cards to donate it's resources to the other and it does not support more than 2 monitors (one on DVi, the other on VGA).

For this I needed a PCIe card and a PCI graphics card, and this supported up to 4 monitors.

For anyone who has ever tried it, 3 monitors is the business!

I used a 2 monitor setup to do draughting in CAD, and that was good with one screen handling the drawing itself and the other screen handling the command line interface, word processing and spreadsheet references, etc, but the 3 screen is even better.

They have: 18 posts

Joined: Feb 2011

Hi,
Why you spend more money ......?
You want to installed basic software ..that's all software run in your old PC ..upgrade your processeser and increase you RAM....!

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