What is good mobo for Vista Ultimate?

[Buggs1a]

I'm looking to buy a really good motherboard for Windows Vista Ultimate. It
will be Intel cpu based on Intel Core 2 Duo/Quad in future maybe. Needs Raid
0 sata and sata for backup hard drives. Needs regular IDE as well for my ide
dvdrw drive etc. Needs onboard audio and firewire etc. No onboard video
unless it can be totally easy to disable and not interfere with Vista
Ultimate or PCI-E 16x slots.

I will be putting in this board

1: 2gb of ram for dual channel. 2x 1gb sticks. What is good?
2: 2 Western Digital 10k rpm sata 74gb as Raid 0 for main boot drive where
Vista Ultimate will go. Are there any boards that will work with this and I
do not have to use a floppy or anything for the raid drivers or anything?
3: 160gb sata backup hard drive
4: EVGA SLI capable GF 6800GT 256mb PCI-E 16x video card. Will not be using
sli right now, but may in future.
5: Floppy drive
6: ide lightscribe dvdrw drive
7: External usb2.0 500gb hard drive
8: usb 2.0 external 200gb hard drive
9: usb printer color laser from hp
10: usb all in one unit
11: usb/ps2 keyboard
12: usb wireless mouse

That's pretty much all I'm gonna connect to it.

What I plan to buy is
1: Good motherboard
2: the ram
3: the cpu which might be the intel core 2 duo E6600 maybe? Not totally
sure.

I've heard online that the core2duos are better then the amdx2 dual cores.
currently i have an amdx2 4200+ and asus a8nsli deluxe in one pc and I like
the performance ok. but it's not really good for vista, the board.

thanks guys.

 

[Sylvain Lafontaine]

If you really want the SLI, then the Asus P5N-E SLI would be a good choice,
otherwise I would choose the Asus P5B Deluxe Mother Board with (or without)
Wifi. See for exemple:

http://techreport.com/etc/2007q1/mar-system-guide/index.x?pg=4

However, you must take care about the SLI because it not only require a mobo
for SLI but also the power supply and if possible, the memory too, otherwise
you might lose a good part of its performance.

Also, the GF 6800GT is a bad choice here. The only good choice for Vista
would be the GeForce 8800 GTS or the GeForce 8800 GTX. Not only the 8800
serie are the only video cards to offer support for DirectX 10.0 but their
new generation of GPU are much more better than any previous GPU from nVidia
or ATI. A 8800 GTX in a single card configuration will probably beat any
other card in SLI configuration, so it's not really hard to take a decision
here.

Finally, forget about external USB 2.0 hard drives and take a look instead
at external eSata drives.

Also, if I were you, I would pay less for the hard drives and choose to buy
4 hard drives in a RAID 10 configuration instead of having two hard drives
in a Raid 0 and a third hard drive for backup. Personnally, I would buy
four Seagate 250GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA (ST3250620AS) instead: 5
years of warranty. This will cost you less and you will have a bigger
capactiy, nearly the same performance and a much better security for your
data.

I agree that the Western Digital 10k will give you a better performance but
the difference is not enough to compensate for the loss of capacity (you
never have to much hard drive's capacity) and security. The few seconds
that you will save with the Western Digital 10k here and there will be
nothing in comparaison with all these hours that you will lose each
day/week/month of backup to the second hard drive (if you make them).