Motherboards Just bought an i7 2600k......which mobo?

Fairly simple question really. I was thinking that a few people might be running sandybridge systems by now and could offer some information on which motherboard to go for.

Is it worth shelling out for something like the Asus Maximus IV Extreme. Or would I be better off saving £150ish and going with a cheaper board? I'd like something that can do the 2600k justice (aswell as my GTX 580's) and not need to be upgraded for a while.

I also need a board that will take my Crucial Ballistix PC3-12800 Ram.

Cheers.

 

Go for the Asus P67 Pro. The Maximus no way worth the extra money.

 

The real high end boards tend to be over indulgent, like ph4ZeD said, the Asus P67 Pro should see to all your needs

 

I'm just trying to think in terms of future proofing and overclockability. I don't want to end up wanting to upgrade my mobo 8 months down the line. But I do see your point. There have been some very good overclocks on the P67 pro and it is relatively cheap. Just a shame it looks so naff.

 

Looks naff? I think it looks pretty nice, it is quite typical of current motherboards to be honest.

It seems to be a decent board and I doubt you would want to upgrade in 8 months time, unless there is something the Maximus can do that you really want/need?

 

no future proofing with computers

 

I have a P8P67 Pro and it's great bar the teething problems.

 

+1 for the P8P67 Pro - great feature set for the cash, just need to flash the stock bios which is pants.

 

If you are thinking of overclocking, I was stop, read and watch this review first.

http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_mainboard/gigabyte_p67a-ud7_review/1

Worth the extra? I think so

 

Same old tbh, just with gold instead of blue. Sandy Bridge is CPU limited not motherboard. Get the Asus Pro - at least you have UEFI if you like something futureproof and you'll not see it buried in your PC anyway

 

that gigabyte board is awesome, I saw the video review the guy did for it http://www.youtube.com/user/TimeToLiveCustoms#p/u/1/DFmw3kFjwgs basically what he says is that even though most of us where led to believe that sandy bridge would only overclock when it was on turbo mode the gigabyte board doesn't, it will just sit at what ever you get your cpu at 4.9-5Ghz even when its not under load, he did say it could be a Bios thing. But its also ridiculously easy to overclock and looks damn sexy in my opinion, Asus is a good board, but if I had the money I'd buy that :]

 

The Gigabyte does not have UEFI, which is a bizarre step backwards.

 

As far as I can see UEFI just makes the BIOS look a little bit nicer. Other than that, does it really offer any other advantages?

That Gigabyte board certainly seems to have some good reviews.

 

definatley, unless your bothered about how the bios looks, which seems an odd thing when we've had years of bog standard bios's or your care about being able to use a mouse in the bios then I wouldn't worry, and yeah, if you can afford the board mate go for it

 

Faster boot-up, ability to boot from GPT disks (implying the ability to boot from disks bigger than 2TB), drivers/apps can be integrated into the firmware, and the warm satisfaction of having a computer that has dispensed with the last vestige of 1980s technology

 

The look of the BIOS doesn't bother me in the slightest and my OS disk is only 500GB anyway. The only downside that I can see to this board is that the 2 PCI-E x16 slots don't allow any breathing room for dual SLI setups. I'm wondering if this could cause problems with my 580's?

It seems to have great overclocking potential.

 

No, that's complete misunderstanding of how Sandy Bridge CPUs work. If OC3D did some actual research and bothered to ask Gigabyte, Asus, MSI and Intel, he would know this. Otherwise it's lazy journalism if you ask me.

Overclocking on Sandy Bridge is entirely enabled through TurboMode. If you disable power saving states it will always stay IN TurboMode, and if not it'll scale back and forth. Why you would want the CPU always burning away very hot at several GHz- even when it's not doing anything - is beyond me though.

Gigabyte has - admittedly - cleverly masked this fact by just offering the traditional multiplier option, which is very intuitive, while ASUS and MSI require the 'TurboMode' change Intel specifically specs. On the ASUS board you can, however, even change each individual core multiplier and power use differently as well, allowing you to tweak the absolute most out of the chip, which you can't do on the Gigabyte.

Frankly the UD7 - as always - is an unnecessary upsell, the UD4 does everything the 7 does as it uses the same BIOS. The only difference is that it's just blue not gold. I do find it quirky you don't care how the BIOS looks, yet, you like the Gigabyte board design/colours! Surely once it's in the case you don't see it anyway, yet, UEFI/BIOS is an interactive medium like an OS, and since when has keyboard alone been faster than M&K? I can appreciate if the colour choice was for a mod, because matt black is teh sex in an bespoke all black setup, but most cases these days don't even come with windows..

The Gigabyte boards DO support booting with GPT though, as Gigabyte hacked it into the legacy BIOS.

 

I don't really care about the appearance of the BIOS, because I will most likely just use it once to do some tweaking and then not really ever look at it again, although the UEFI is quite appealing.. My case also does have a window, so I'd like a board that looks half decent.

Basically I have around £300 to burn on a motherboard, that's why I'm finding it hard to lean towards these lower end (cheaper) boards. In the top end bracket for 1155 mobo's the only competitors really seem to be the Maximus IV or the P67A-UD7. I'm really after something that's going to overclock like a beast and not hamper the performance of my SLI setup.

 

A single graphics card doesn't even saturate an 8x PCI-E 2.0 link, never mind a 16x link. 8x/8x will not hamper dual 580s at all. Even a cheaper board with 16x/4x won't significantly affect performance (couple of fps at most), but these boards tend to be crossfire only since they saved money by not paying the SLI royalty fee for them

 

both the ud4 and ud7 support crossfire and sli, the ud4 2 way and the ud7 3 way