Help me buy a motherboard?

[Lyris]

OK, so I'm doing a PC upgrade. I want a nice shiny new Intel Core i7 (Socket 1366).

Normally I've gone for Asus motherboards, but I've heard Gigabyte are good too. The only trouble is that they have a lot of different models with seemingly little to differentiate between them. I'll be using the system for video editing and encoding so the CPU will be getting hammered constantly (not sure if that affects mobo choice). Stability is obviously my #1 priority.

Unless I've missed it, none of the manufacturers' sites seem to have a "Motherboard Chooser" thing. Anyone have any suggestions on what features I should look out for? What I should avoid? Is it just the case that there is not much difference between the boards? Can I just choose based on what ports I need?

Right now I have an Asus P5K-E with 8gb RAM installed. Will my old RAM work on the new motherboards?

[briareos_kerensky]

Nope, the 1366 uses DDR3 while you are using DDR2.

I've built two PCs with a 1366 Gigabyte motherboard and I'm running them daily (one is the main PC at home and the other is at the office) without any problems.
I chose Gigabyte over Asus for the slightly lower price and what I thought were better features between the two brands...the X58-UD5 I chose had more SATA ports and a PCI-E configuration I liked more than the top-end Asus board at the time.

[abigsmurf]

Gigagbytes have good build quality for the price.

For pure CPU grunt work you don't need many advanced features, especially if you're not going to overclock, So long as it's got plenty of ram slots and one 16x PCIE and I'd imagine you'd be fine. Just avoid a MATX (any motherboard model ending and M), they're very compact and you can have cooling issues.

[charlesr]

I recently got the top on this list at novatech. I got a bundle.

Asus P7P55D Intel P55 (Socket 1156) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard. It has no onboard gpu.

It seemed good for the price and supported the i5 and i7 (I went for the quieter and cooler i5 - my videoprocessing is now almost realtime in 720p and way fast in SD). Well put together, lots of space.

I also got a power supply from quietpc, but the one I got (which is lovely) is no longer stocked there.

[Lyris]

Thanks guys - new RAM it is then. Looks like I'll just search for an Asus or Gigabyte board that has USB3 and ESATA support and see what's in stock.

I'm going to grab an i7 to try and speed video encoding up a bit. For me right now 1080p/24fps for Blu-ray (at max quality) encoding time is measured in seconds per frame, not frames per second...

[Lyris]

Well that's lucky. Look what came up at Scan - special offer for ScanShot email subscribers.

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Rev 2 Motherboard
Intel Core i7 950 Quad Core CPU
6GB (3x2GB) Corsair XMS3 Memory
£432.39 Inc VAT

https://secure.scan.co.uk/aspnet/Shop/AddToBasket.aspx?WebProductId=1353734&TrackingTag=msso0186

Ordered!