Upgrading current PC to an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe need some advice.

[crazz2323]

Ok, I had a recent change of plans on my PC upgrade thanks to everyones advice on this forum. I am now looking to get a Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz CPU, some Corsair DDR2 memory (not sure exactly what yet), and a new motherboard since my old one was for an AMD CPU. My questions are as follows:

1) What is a good solid motherboard for the CPU I want to get? I need it to run cool as well without adding any additional cooling products. Is this one overkill? Asus P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe. I read some reviews on it off Newegg.com and a number of people seemed to get defective boards not sure if that was when it first came out or what. Is there anything that is good thats maybe a step down or costs around $120-$150?

2) I have a 600Watt Enermax Noisetaker Power supply with two 12v rails and an overal rating of 35A will this be good enough if I go with a dual core CPU? Keep in mind I am using a Geforce 8800 GTX video card as well. All works fine on my current system:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 CPU
Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard
1 BFG Geforce 8800 GTX
Sound Blaster X-FI Extreme Fatality
Plextor DVDR PX-704A DVD R/W drive
2 Western Digital Raptors in a RAID 0 config
2 sticks (1gb each) of Dual Channel Corsair PC 3200 memory.

Thanks for any advice!

 

[Nitestick]

1) look at 965p chipset motherboards, forum favourites are the P5B series (http://usa.asus.com/search.aspx?searchitem=1&searchkey=p965) and the Gigabyte 965p-s3 and 965p-DS3 boards

2) the power supply should be adequate.

 

[crazz2323]

Thanks for the link, but what one of those should I choose lol! My head is swimming with the amount of motherboards out there. I do want to keep the budget down a bit so I'm looking at the ASUS P5B-E for $150. Anyone have any bad experiences with this board? Does it play well with Geforce 8800 gtx's in SLI? The P5B-Plus Vista Edition looks neat but I believe it was just released and it will be expensive. I'm not an overclocker but I want a stable board that stays cool and can handle future CPU upgrades like going Quad core.

Actually, on further investigation the boards you linked me do not support SLI it seems.

 

[crazz2323]

Ok, this will be my upgraded system:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4Ghz
ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus Motherboard
1 BFG Geforce 8800 GTX
Sound Blaster X-FI Extreme Fatality
Plextor DVDR PX-704A DVD R/W drive
2 Western Digital Raptors in a RAID 0 config
2 sticks (1gb each) of Dual Channel Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X2048-6400C4 DDR2 800 PC 6400 memory

I want to do a fresh install of Vista Home Premium once this is all together.

1) Should I use the new beta drivers for this motherboard or stick to the windows XP ones?
2) How many drivers will Vista already install for me so I don't need to? For example, will the RAID drivers be in Vista? What about audio, LAN, and the chipset etc? Some of those are only beta so I assume not.
3)Should I upgrade BIOS when I get this motherboard if it is below a certain version? Will I have any problems with this configuration? Seems some people in posts had to manually adjust memory settings in BIOS with certain memory.
4)If not in Vista, do I have to rebuild the RAID array or something before I install the operating system or if I just format my drives (currently in a RAID configuration) will it just work as the same RAID?