Help choosing motherboard

[aif]

Hi, im taking my components out of my shuttle and upgrading to a full case. i just bought a antec p180 and i need help finding a mother board. im looking for a socket 775 sli board. this is the only one that i have found with everything i need and a reasonable price but i have read something about the pci-e running at less then x16. wondering if anyone has heard anything about this or can recommend another board. another question that im having is i have pc3200 ddr ram and it seems that all the new motherboards are ddr2. will my ram work on these? and for the last thing. i would like to know what my processor is exactly, all i know is that it is socket 775 3.0 ghz p4. i dont know if its a prescott or any of those other names. any help would be appreciated.

[Ace]

What brand of board were you considering?  I looked up a couple socket 775 ASUS boards online; both stated 533 (4200) or 667 (5300) RAM compatibility... so hadn't seen one that mentioned 400 (3200) was figured.  Both stated they had 2 x16 PCIE ports; some chipsets run the PCI Express at x16 with one video card but knock the two down to x8 when running two in SLI... The two ASUS I looked up (New Egg and Tiger Direct) look like they stay at x16 even when running two video cards in SLI.

The DDR2 capability splits the memory load between two like memory sticks, so you need to have 2 pieces installed (exactly the same type/size) to share to get that benefit...  Is your 3200 memory in two pieces?

I'd recommend checking the memory company sites to see motherboard compatibility, as well as scoping out the motherboard manufacturer's site on the particular motherboard capability.  We've had a series of discussions on motherboards recently, so check through the other poasts to pick up on that.

Ace; janitor and jester; the techies will be in soon after they get off break.

[Carskick]

Some boards, esspecially with older SLI chipsets do drop the PCIe slots to 8x from 16x when 2 video cards are installed. I would not worry too much about this because bottleneck is rarely in the bus with PCIe 8x or 16x. Basically the bandwidth is split between the two cards, but it will make a neglegable effect on performance with modern equipment. I will look for some benchmarks to make you feel more comfortable about this.

As far as memory, DDR will NOT work with a DDR2 motherboard. It is a completely different interface. Also, the speed on DDR2 is not directly comparable to DDR. DDR 533 would be much faster than DDR2 533. However, DDR2 is available up to 1066 at the moment, which has more bandwidth than any of the DDR standards.