For the budget gaming build im making the only motherboards i can find under £100 that have 2 PCI-E x16 slots all have the second one limited to x4 speeds, i was wondering wether this would be a large disadvantage in the future if i decide to move to CrossFire?
Yeah, dont bother even thinking about xfire on those mate. Tried it myself and its very dissapointing.
if your looking at a budget gaming PC then dont bother with such premium features. Money can be better spent elsewhere rather than for what if scenarios theres a reason budget boards or even mid-range ones sometimes dont have those features they assume your only going to be using 1 GPU since your buying a cheaper more modest mobo
@asura: The problem is that if we talk about x16+x4 boards, then the secondary x16@x4 PCI-E connector is usually connected via ICH in case of Intel. That means half-speed lanes, in other words it is at speed of PCI-E 1.1 x4, which equals to PCI-E 2.0 x2 in terms of bandwidth. Plus add the latency of ICH itself. Crossfire itself is a bad idea to use, but with "crippled" boards it is even worse.
agree with adam here if your looking at a budget build, just get a good overclocking board, and forget the crossfire stuff, you could always upgrade the board at a later date if you really wanted to do something mad like 2 or 3 way crossfire, but your better of, getting one good card now, sell it when you have the money or the time comes to upgrade and go to a 7000 series ATI card or 600 nvidia cards when they are released.
The processor is (Will be) an AMD Phenom II 965, And i was basically just looking at every motherboard on Scan that holds AM3 processors One i've looked at that seems to be okay is this one: Link Just wanted to know your thoughts on the board The card im likely to get is either a 6870 or a 6950 if i can get the extra funds, both of which im assuming should be fine for quite a while? Can you recommend any good AM3 boards for overclocking that are around the £70 price for the board i mentioned?
