new motherboard

[LightSpeed]

here are the options for my cheap new gaming rig:

Gigabyte P35-DS3L
Asus P5K-Pro
MSI P35 Neo-2

this will be paired with some g.skill PC8000 powerchips and a cheap ass E2160 1.6.

I was hoping to save some $$ and go for the DS3L. I dont need sata RAID, but i was thinking if the other boards will offer more OC headroom(due to better cooling, since spending more for cooling on the DS3L brings the price almost up to the level of the other two boards). how much of a difference is there?

thanks

[Hans Gruber]

I have both the Gigabyte and the MSI P35 NEO-2 FR. My vote is for the MSI NEO-2 FR because of the heatpipe cooling system. It helps with overclocking. I've tried to kill my board several times with very high voltage, but it refuses to die.

[jton219]

i have the giga and it works great. u cant go wrong with any of those. gigabyte uses all solid state caps that will outlive the board. giga and msi are both based off of the intel reference board with the caps and slots filled in. Asus i think has its own design. Plenty of peeps have pushed the ds3l past 450fsb. ive gotten a q6600 to 400fsb pretty easy. how far are you planning on taking your e2160? u can buy a 40mm fan and stick on the northbridge for like 4 bucks. i think with your cpu, you will hit the cpu's limit before any of these baords become the bottlenecking factor. the ds3 bios is easy and pretty intuitive, jsut remember to press ctrl+f1. i live the 10 or so bio profiles u can save. saves you alot of time when switching between settings.

[zanzabar]

i like the ds2l over the ds3l

[jton219]

on this forum there are over 96 pages (2300 + posts) of support for ga-p35 in the "official ga p35" thread. u should be able to get any and all the help u need from there. mihgt be same for msi, bu those Gigabyte cats are pretty helpful and responsive.