Dream Machine

[Bruce A Thompson]

Hi Gtober

At the time that MOBO came out, it was the hottest on the market. I built a machine from it with an Extreme 2 core CPU which cost $1100. The MOBO was the transitional board and was upgradeable to the lower end Quad cores.

I sold my Extreme CPU later to a gamer on Ebay and bought a Quad Core for less than half the money that doubled the output of the computer.

A lot of folks built using that mobo. It was stable as a box of rocks. Mine is still in use today as my primary desktop.

That being said though, technology has passed it by. The board is limited to DDR2 memory at no more speed than 1333 fsb. Also don't bother to outrun the fsb speed of the CPU as that is as fast as the whole thing will run anyway. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145184

As for a video card, I would take advantage of the second PCU X16 slot and buy another (identical) GForce 8600GT and link it with the old one via the SLI bridge connector. Running the two cards in SLI together will double the video crunching power. http://www.google.com/search?q=p5n+32e+sli+video+cards&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a