Best Q6600 board?

[JimRune]

Upgrading to Q6600 from an AMD 3500+. Need to get a motherboard and RAM that works.

Last time I built a computer for myself, the whole motherboard ordeal wasn't a problem. Now I'm seeing motherboards that I feel are too expensive and have things I don't need, and when I find one that's in a price range I like, all the comments about it on Newegg are not-so-good.

There was this one I liked, out of all of them I looked at: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131187

However, the memory standard is DDR 1066. And at the bottom of the specs it reads:

Quote:

The chipset officially supports the memory frequency up to DDR3 1066MHz/DDR2 800. Due to the tuning by ASUS exclusive technology, this motherboard natively supports up to DDR3 1333/DDR2 1066MHz. Please refer to www.asus.com or user manual for Memory QVL

What does that even mean?

Anyway, I'm looking for a board under $130 that works. Most of the comments about all these 775 boards are more like horror stories, such as the board being DOA and having to RMA it, sometimes even twice.

Some of these boards apparently also need to be flashed before you can put in a quad core.. Which doesn't make much sense. Does that mean I have to put in a processor it does support, update the bios, and then put in the processor I actually want to use?

Really, very confused.

[him61]

I'd stick with DDR2 right now... This is a really popular board, I myself own one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128042

[JimRune]

Thanks for the suggestion. However, when I totaled everything out, I was at $500 for just the motherboard, processor, and RAM! I'm not doing any major upgrades, so I decided to hold off on the Q6600 and I went with the AMD 6000+. Saved myself about $200 in the long run, but I appreciate your help. That did really clear things up for me.