Motherboards Need pointers for my LGA1156 CPU

Hi all, wondering if you tech savvy peeps here can help me choose a motherboard for my Intel i5 750 LGA1156 CPU I got at a bargain price of around £80.

It seems to be a veritable minefield out there with the choices but with USB 3.0 and SATA 600 taking hold now I would like to upgrade my main rig if only for longevity.

I was looking at the ASRock P55 Extreme4 mobo but I see the same problem as with the first gen LGA1156 boards in that the USB 3.0, the SATA 600 and the PCIE devices all eat into each others bandwidth.

The main problem with that is I do quite a lot of video converting and editing and as I upscale old anime vids and DVDs into HD formats, a USB 3.0 or PCIE capture device would be a great upgrade. With one of those devices working hard, a GPU for GFX/CUDA encoding, a GPU for physX/CUDA encoding and the HDD's saving the streamed data, will I bottleneck in the busses or the chipset?

Any and all help is appreciated.

 

Would help if you gave us a price range.

 

Gigabyte GA-P55-UD2 and if you want buy a USB 3.0 card. your not going to get much more at that price range.

 

enabling USB/SATA 3.0 on the GA-P55 downgrades the primary 16X PCIE port to 8X...which most people agree isnt a huge hit in performance (something like 5%?). im running my 5870 at that speed and, while im sure im bottle necked at the port, i havnt had any problems with running any games at that speed.

just keep in mind that occupying the second 16X PCIE port downgrades both ports to 4X....and there i would imagine youd have a pretty noticeable hit. but if you only plan on using one 16X device i wouldnt worry about bandwidth.

 

No price limit really as I saved on the CPU.

Thanks for the pointer but I see even with an expansion card I will lose bandwidth on the PCIE bus. It'll be even worse if I go for a PCIE SSD controller card too.

As I would be occupying at least 2 16X and 1 1X slot or 1 USB 3.0 I can only conclude from the help so far I will have to wait a little longer for a LGA1156 optimised board.

Go on, tell me I should have got an i7.

Thanks for the help so far chaps. Keep the suggestions coming in on different setups and your eyes peeled for any new boards leaked or released.

 

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Will those do?

 

if you disable the SATA/USB 3.0, i think the X16 ports run at X8/X8, which is perfectly reasonable. to tell you the truth, even most SSD's can barely fill a SATA 2.0 pipe these days, so SATA 3.0 is really not needed (unless your running a crazy SSD and/or RAID 0 setup). and if your like me, you only transfer a gig or 2 at a time via USB, which really doesnt take THAT long on 2.0...

or, if you can get away with only one X16 port occupied then you can use SATA/USB 3.0 with no noticable loss of video performance.

currently, im delighted with my P55 chip. it got me up and running for cheap and it still competes as a current generation rig. the X58 chip might be a little more "future resistant", as my X8 speed starts to choke off video performance in future bandwidth-hungry games...but right now it fulfills my needs.

 

If you end up using one of the GA-P55A boards, just don't enable the SATA3 or USB3 turbo mode, and the bandwidth wont be stolen from the GPUs. Indeed, you won't get "full" SATA3/USB3 speeds, but really, nobody needs them.

If you REALLY want to use so much PCIe performance, you'll need to go for either a P55 board with NF200 multiplexer (i know the P55A-UD7 has one) or yeah... go for X58.

Oh, and before anybody says it, Sandy Bridge is not your answer, as it too has only 16 PCIe lanes from the processor.

 

You'll have to help me with that one as Sinclair basic and machine code were my programing languages.

You're right about the P55 chipset being good enough but I see a problem in that there seems to be bad bus design for all the new high speed interconnects. It appears that whatever way I set up to capture, convert and then save, it will eat into one or all of their bandwidth, the outcome of which I have no idea.

Mmmmmm.

I was hoping to consolidate my workstation and gaming rig into one system but it's not looking good.

Thanks for the suggestion. That board has gone straight to the top of the list.

Here, have some rep sir.