Motherboard and Memory

Motherboard

With a goal of keeping our system as quiet as possible without needed to sacrifice appropriate thermal management for mission critical stability, we wanted a motherboard incorporating passive cooling. If we weren't so concerned about passive cooling, the DFI Lanpart UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert would be at the top of our short list.

The nForce 4 platform remains our chipset of choice for AMD Athlon/Opteron systems. It offers superb performance, reliability, and a robust feature set. Moreover, when features such as the hardware firewall are discovered to have bugs that corrupt software downloads, NVIDIA has been a proactive company that's worked to quash problems as they are discovered via software updates.

The main advantages of the A8N32SLI-Deluxe over the standard version are dual x16 PCI express slots when running SLI graphics, 8 phase CPU power, and additional SATA-II ports. However, the disadvantage is that the A8N32-SLI is a two-chip motherboard design which results in greater cooling requirements and less ideal placement of the PCI ports. In our system build, a secondary goal was to keep the system as quiet as possible without compromising long-term reliability.

Since our mid-range system will not be running SLI (would break our $400/component price tag) and because we will be using a high-quality power supply, we opted to go for the older A8N-SLI Premium instead. To be clear, all of these motherboards are exceptional choices and the price difference is small enough where it's probably better to go for the A8N32-SLI or DFI Expert. For our needs, the standard version is good enough. For gamers who don't mind the louder chipset fan on the DFI Expert, or the dual chip design of the A8N32SLI, those two motherboards will likely be a better choice.

ASUS A8N-SLI Premium

ASUS A8N Premium SLI
$170 – http://www.asus.com

Memory

FiringSquad strongly recommends the use of brand-name memory in your system builds. Although performance differences "day 1" may not be noticeable, we consistently experience better long-term stability with RAM from companies such as from Corsair and OCZ. While we are comfortable saying that there are several manufacturers with high-quality memory products, at the end of the day, we have to pick one manufacturer to use in one system. Alexis and I tend to use Corsair RAM in the systems we build for ourselves and when building for others. In fact, FiringSquad's web and database servers run Corsair as well. That said, I used OCZ's flagship RAM in the last DFI system build and had great results too. Brandon uses OCZ RAM the last time I checked too. I have nothing but good results with OCZ memory, but if I had to say on record what brand of memory is in most of the PCs that I build or recommend to others, the answer is Corsair. I think fundamentally the reason for choosing Corsair is that the price is pretty similar among all flagship memory manufacturers, and if I know that Corsair works well, why should I try a different brand? It's not like power supplies where I'm trying to find something as good as a PC Power & Cooling PSU for less money or heatsinks where I'm trying to find better performance.

For this system build, we went with the Corsair TWINX2048-3200C2PT. Although the RAM doesn't feature any flashy LEDs or offer blazing clockspeeds or ridiculously small latencies, the TWINX2048-3200C2 offers exceptional value. Games are already benefiting from 2GB of system memory, and the 2-3-3-6 timings reflect the inflection point where you get the most value for the money. In addition, the faster memory from OCZ and Corsair also tend to produce more heat and require more system cooling.

Corsair TWINX2048-3200C2PT
$240 – http://www.corsair.com

Silverstone NT02 with Corsair TWINX3200C2-PT