Yes, it's one of THOSE threads. The kind of thing you probably get asked ten billion times.

I'm shopping for a motherboard. This will be my first little venture of building my own rig, but I'm not a computer dummy. Been a serious gamer for years n years n years, and have a few friends with more of the technical knowledge that have been able to offer insight into some of the workings with current hardware. I'll try to answer more questions so that you can get a better idea of what I'm looking for.


The Current System was looking something like this.

Case: Silver Lian-Li PC-V1010A Aluminum ATX Super Full Tower

Motherboard: ASUS Striker II Formula

Video: GeForce9800GTX+
(May do liquid cooled, but was currently looking at the Accelero Xtreme 9800 fan)

Ram: 2x2GB Corsair Dominator DDR2

OS: Windows XP Home Edition



I was just about finalizing what I was going to buy, when I started reading allot of concerning reviews about the Striker II Formula motherboard. I read that it had some serious heating issues on the north bridge, sometimes bringing it near shutdown within minutes of turning it on. This has been mixed in with great reviews, and I'm kind of second guessing myself here. I decided that I didn't want to play russian roulette with my motherboard, so I came here to see if you all might be able to suggest to me an alternative, if there needs to be one.

I'm going to be doing gaming, modeling, mapping. I won't be overclocking anything or heavily tweaking anything. I won't be upgrading to quad core (if I ever do It'l be a long time down the road). I am not planning on using DDR3 memory.

I'm mainly concerned with heating issues and I'm planning on getting a liquid cooling system for the CPU, unsure of whether I want to hook it up to the video. I'm completely open for suggestion to this, and if anyone has any preferences or tips, I would appreciate it.

Also, one last thing. I've had some people say things like "well X is a good brand name" and "I hear that Y motherboards are nice.". I need something a little more solid than that- brand, board name/model number, specs/benchmarks, if there's any major concerns with the board, things like that. I'd like to get this thing put together in the next few days/weeks or 2 if I can.

Any help and tips are greatly appreciated, thankyou all again.