I basically need to know which motherboard would be the easiest for me to overclock a Q9450 using 8gb of 1066 DDR2?? I was looking at one of the asus boards like the strike II as it seemed to have some sort of overclocking program that did it automatically for u??

Don't be lazy and OC through the bios manually. Doing this will give you the best OC with the lowest vcore. This further means lower heat, which means longer life, which also means less global warming...you get the point.

If you're looking to OC that beast really high, an X38/48 is highly recommended. Asus makes great boards so go take a look.

If you're looking for a cheaper board, I'd go with the Asus P5k-E. It has been known to hit 500MHz FSB.

whats really high? i only intend to go to about 3.2ghz which i would have thought is only a mediocre oc? I will be using air cooling.

I just bought an Abit IP35 Pro motherboard and intend to overclock my Q9450 to roughly that clock speed, air cooling should just about cover it. The IP35 Pro is a good board...

I have a Asus p5e; i manually overclocked a Q9450 to 3.2 GHz... granted i did not use the stock cpu cooler

I have got the Gigabyte GA Ex38 DS5 board and my Q9450 is overclocked to 3Ghz but using the CIA function in the BIOS which increases the overclock to 3.4Ghz under load, this gives me a very quiet system during light use and a fast system when playing games. I'm using a Zalman 9700NT.

My max Tcase temp was 60 degrees C after a 22 hour burn in with Prime 95, during playing Crysis the CPU max's out at 49-50 degeees.

3.2Ghz is moderate, I should think most P35s could handle that.

i would class 3.8 as really high. 3.6ghz would class as high.