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I'm looking to upgrade straight into an i7 system from a really, really old athlon system. So I'm looking to building a completely new system later this year. However most of the current LGA1336 motherboards are far too expensive for my tastes, and have some things that I really don't need. I've been looking at the cheapest Gigabyte has to offer: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128375 and it's looking pretty good! I'm only going to use 6GB ram anyway, and start with only one hard drive and maybe add another one later. What do you think about this board? Are there any other quality, cheaper LGA1336 boards coming soon?

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P55 boards should start showing up, but it could be 6-8 months away, I don't know honestly, but they did say it would be later in the year.

That gigabyte board looks good, just search for some professional reviews to make sure it doesn't have any bad quirks, like the video slots not running full speed.

So that board only has 4 memory slots. That's fine if you want 2GB sticks in three slots for triple channel speed, but it's a limitation if you want to add three more sticks later (since obviously 6 sticks won't fit in 4 slots)

As long as you're OK with this boards limitations it looks like the most affordable way to join the i7 club. Gigabyte has a good reputation.

The LGA1366 platform is not designed for cheap. You are looking at the mainstream LGA1160 Nehalem code name Lynnfield, for now being labelled the i5's. Although there is only one i7 chip bearing the "Extreme Edition" moniker, most of the other chips, coupled with the X series chipset and triple channel DDR3, is indeed extreme (expensive) edition caliber.

The Lynnfields are coming in the 2nd half of this year. P55 (Ibex Peak) is indeed designed for Lynnfield/Havendale, so it is not on a LGA1366 platform.

That EX58-UD3R looks like a really good deal to me.

You know, you don't *have* to run triple-channel RAM.

FuturePastNow wrote:

That EX58-UD3R looks like a really good deal to me.

You know, you don't *have* to run triple-channel RAM.

$200+ motherboards are not exactly good deals in my book.

What's the point of buying something but not use it? It's like all those people who buy into Nvidia's SLI thing and never put a 2nd card in. Besides, we are still waiting for regular applications that can use so much bandwidth. Remember the 1366 platform (with the triple channel RAM) is mainly targeted at workstation/server workloads.

Flying Fox wrote:

FuturePastNow wrote:

That EX58-UD3R looks like a really good deal to me.

You know, you don't *have* to run triple-channel RAM.

$200+ motherboards are not exactly good deals in my book.

What's the point of buying something but not use it? It's like all those people who buy into Nvidia's SLI thing and never put a 2nd card in. Besides, we are still waiting for regular applications that can use so much bandwidth. Remember the 1366 platform (with the triple channel RAM) is mainly targeted at workstation/server workloads.

I admit I'd rather have a Core 2 Duo on a P45 board than spend $200 on a mobo, but if someone is dead-set on having an i7 system, that Gigabyte board is the cheapest way in. So far. And as for the RAM, from the reviews I've seen, the performance benefit of using triple-channel vs. dual-channel isn't impressive at all. Yet people act like using it is a requirement.

Sleazebag wrote:

So I'm looking to building a completely new system later this year.

How late is later? If it's over a month away, just sit tight and see what the happens between now and a couple of weeks before you're ready to build. If nothing else, wait for Phenom II benchmarks to see what impact they have on the market.