Hi Just recently purchased a Gigabyte MOBO the GA-P35-DS3L P35 775 ATX Motherboard. Also Purchased the Intel E7200 Processor (2.53Ghz Core 2 Duo 1066 bus speed). Was wondering what would yalls recommendations as to going next (graphics card wise) cause there seems to be so MANY choices now and days. Thinking of spending 250-500 on graphics card cause I LOVE to game. hopefully Call of Duty 4 on full settings with this PC, Also if you recommend me returning this Mobo and processor and getting a different one, that can happen. I havent and WONT open them till i have all the parts for the PC to be put together that day. Another question I have is. Can that MOBO take a DDR3 Graphics card. I know the ram is DDr2 But ive heard SOME people say ya and some no. trying to get more info on that subject. Thanks a ton for the help and time. also If you DO happen to recommend a nice graphics card. recommend a Power supply watt amount aswell cause I know the new cards get hot which means more Fans which means more watts . thanks again
The RAM in your system is independent of the video card RAM. You are not required to adhere to a particular memory type. If that were the case, it'd be impossible to run my current system with two GeForce 7900GS's. They use GDDR3 and my system uses DDR2. Additionally, some GPU's can be equipped with different memory for availability and/or pricing reasons. As far as the video card goes, look at something like a GeForce 8800GT or 9600GT or an AMD Radeon HD3870. For the power supply, a few suggestions would be: Corsair HX520/HX620 (modular) Corsair VX550/TX650 Seasonic S12-600 Seasonic M12-600 (modular) Thermaltake Toughpower 600W Thermaltake Purepower RX 600 Enermax Modu 82+ 625 Something in the 500-ish to 600-ish area should be plenty from those companies. Additionally, consider PC Power & Cooling, OCZ, FSP, Sparkle, or Silverstone in the same parameters. You're going to look in the $100-150 range, give or take. Whatever you do, don't skimp on the power supply quality as that's where the stability starts. Gigabyte is fine, and off-hand, unless you're having a problem with the board, I'd stick with it if it's able to fulfill your current and reasonably projected upgrade needs. They have some very solid boards as of late, and the P35 chipset yours has is a great one. The CPU should be fine as well.
