Need some advie on a motherboard

Right now i have the q6600 with Go stepping. I have the 680i MB and I need to know what the best MB would be to get. I am going to get the Corsair H50 water cooling and keeping the q6600. I am at 3.2 right now and am looking for the BEST mb to get me a higher stable clock. Thanks for the advise and help.

The P45 chipset is best for OCing quads.

What are the rest of your system specs?
Are you using SLI?
Do you want RAID?

Here's 3 good P45 boards: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3L/R/P
L: No RAID or Xfire
R: RAID, but no Xfire
P: RAID and Xfire

Thanks for the response...Windows 7 x64 MB XFX 680I LT w/ Quadcore q6600 GO OC to 3.2 Raptor 10K HD sata nvidia GTS 8800 512 4GB DDR DDR2 cooling Gemin 2 Cooler Master Real Power Pro 850W

I will check out that MB... Question, I know computers but I am no expert. can you intruct me on the best way to set up the hard drives. I know you mentioned RAID. Can you give me some insight on that and the best way to set it up. I am trying to increase all my performance. I have 2 sata hard drives now. One is 10K raptor drive only 74 GB and a 250 sata. I would purchase another one if it fit better or would allow me to place these in a RAID type format. Thanks for the help and hopefully I am not too far out on things.

One other thing... how do you get your system specs to be placed on the bottom of your post?

cleaner450 said:

Thanks for the response...Windows 7 x64 MB XFX 680I LT w/ Quadcore q6600 GO OC to 3.2 Raptor 10K HD sata nvidia GTS 8800 512 4GB DDR DDR2 cooling Gemin 2 Cooler Master Real Power Pro 850W

I will check out that MB... Question, I know computers but I am no expert. can you intruct me on the best way to set up the hard drives. I know you mentioned RAID. Can you give me some insight on that and the best way to set it up. I am trying to increase all my performance. I have 2 sata hard drives now. One is 10K raptor drive only 74 GB and a 250 sata. I would purchase another one if it fit better or would allow me to place these in a RAID type format. Thanks for the help and hopefully I am not too far out on things.

One other thing... how do you get your system specs to be placed on the bottom of your post?

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Since you're not using SLI, a P45 board will be a great choice.

Here's a few good reads on Matrix RAID: The Ultimate Matrix RAID Thread

For Matrix RAID you'll need a motherboard with an Intel ICHxR south bridge and 2 or more "identical" HDDs. You may be able to get by with 2 drives that have all the same specs (speed, size, cache, platter density) but different brands. I don't know for sure as I haven't tried that...

RAID0 splits data across 2 or more drives to increase performance by allowing multiple drives to read the data at the same time. Your total available space for RAID0 will be the space of all your HDDs added together.

RAID1 is redundancy, it copies the same data over multiple drives so if a HDD fails you wil not lose data. This is used for storage of files you don't want to lose, and the available space will be the space of one drive.

When you setup RAID, the easiest way, IMO, is to do it before a fresh OS install. So, you'll need to back up data before you start. Just read the "How to Set Up Matrix RAID Array" thread in the thread I linked to. That thread helped me set up my 2xWD Caviar Blacks in a 64GB RAID0 + a 592GB RAID1 a few weeks ago, and it was my first RAID attempt.

If you have any questions feel free to ask.

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Hey what do you think about this MB?

MSI P45 Platinum - motherboard - ATX