I cant seem to find many good mobo's with crossfire that will run a 45nm E8500 and overclock it well I am hoping to get 2 x 3870's and overclock the E8500 on watercooling. Any sugestions on the mobo?
there are some p35 boards that have two x16 slots, but, they *cripple* the second one to 4x electrically. so x38 is the way to go. i've just recently got myself an abit ix38 quadgt, its very light on the accesoires front, but its one of the cheaper x38 boards, got the best layout out of all of them and oc's like a charm. an alternative would be going for a 3870x2 card instead of two 3870, then you could go for a p35 board, the gigabyte p35 DS3R, the abit ip35pro, or a asus p5k. well, actually pretty much all p35 boards are good, sometimes i'm even tempted to refer to p35 as bx440 v2.
3870x2 doesnt require x38, so its cheaper to go for 3870x2 + p35 than 2x 3870 + x38. x38 boards arent bad though, asus p5e (the cooling is a you replace all of it or nothing though), gigabyte x38 ds5 (layout aint perfect) and abit ix38 guadgt (perfect layout, low on accesoires though) in the lower price bracket, or, gigabyte dq6 (for some reason disapearing from several stores), or the asus highend ones (the price can be pretty crazy though), all solid boards that will do well.
Budget is about £1500 for the components. not including case/screen/cooling which i will be budgeting about £1000 for.
well, with such a budget a x38 board would easily fit in. i'd go for the abit ix38 quadgt, best layout and oc's well. (nb runs a little hot if you go volt happy, but no problem since you plan on watercooling anyway).
thats a good bord too, only downside is the cooling, its all or nothing if you want to use aftermarket coolers.
