I am looking to upgrade from my dated system in the next 4-5 months, and I have been looking at an i5 2500k system. Now I am generally happy with the components I have decided on. i5 2500K Asus P8P67 Pro R3 8GB Vengance/Domintator/anything else that takes my fancy at time of purchase. 128gb SSD - Which ever is good at the time OCZ Stealth Xstream II 600W PSU H60 cooler Fractal Design R3 Now you don't see a GPU there. Reason being I am probably gonna get a GPU to stick in this system for now, aswell as a Q6600. But here is the question, I have my eye on an MSI GTX560Ti Hawk, which will then go in the new system. And for the extra head room, maybe SLI it with another one in the new system. Now back in the day I built my last computer you either got and SLI or a Crossfire mobo, there were a few that did both but were silly expensive. Today it looks like most mobo's support both, but does the one I have picked, or any other mobo truly lean towards either SLI or Crossfire. Or is it pretty much user choice and the mobo's are man enough to happily run either.
pertty much user choice mate, if it helps ive the mbo in my sig does both and is an excellent board althoug i havnt tried ocing on it yet, but i can be had on scans daily deals for 120 quid edit: that would be a nice build by the way
The mobo you have choose ASUS P8P67 PRO does support SLI & Crossfire, with that chipset when you use dual GPU's you get X8 from both slots.
So does that lose me bandwidth from the cards running in SLI? I've never really read in to this. edit:: Looking here there doesn't seem to be a great drop in performance http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/08/23/gtx_480_sli_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x8x8/
It does reduce bandwidth. Single card = 16x 2 cards = 8x8x If you got the gigabyte UD7 you could get 2 cards = 16x16x But the reduction in perfOrmance is Tiny so no one really bothers until below 8x to bother.
I had never read into this, but when I was buying my throttling 16x - > 8x/8x board I pretty much came to the conclusion myself that the bandwidths were high enough that it would never make noticeable a difference on my 23" monitor if I went dual card in the future, nice article that...
Looking at the price difference between the ASUS and the Gigabyte mobo, I think I'll stick with the ASUS, like you say it seem the performance gain is negligible compared to the cost. It's more then half of another GTX560Ti
If I were you I'd check out the Msi p67a-gd53. I used one in a build recently and it was a great board. Plus it was £100 only
