Hey all, about 6 months ago i bought myself a new pc, and it still runs very nicely. Specs are as follows: CPU - Intel C2D E6600 MOBO - ASUS P5B-E RAM - G.Skill 2x 1GB @ 800Mhz - 4-4-4-12 Timings GPU - EVGA 8800 GTS 640MB HDD - WD 500GB SATA II CASE - Lian-Li PC 7b Plus PSU - Enermax Liberty 500w Sli Compliant DVD - Samsung Optical LCD - Samsung 206BW 20" Widescreen 2ms @ 3000:1 So all in all a pretty nice system, but as new games draw ever closer i would like to get myself SLI ready. I will want to keep everything apart from the mobo, so basically im just looking for advice and knowledge on a good SLI motherboard. I will be buying the second 8800 GTS at a later date (i.e. when i have the monies) Any advice would be appreciated, as i dont have any prior knowledge of SLI motherboards atall. Thanks. Caff.
well, i guess for the board £150ish. budget isnt really a major concern, im more concerned with future proofing this machine, so im willing to consider all options and advice at the moment. also i need a new cpu cooler for the intel c2d e6600 775.
Another question is do you want a massive-OC'er, or do you want a feature-rich board? You can get yourself a P6N Diamond for about £210, which has so many features it'll make your head spin. On the other hand you can get yourself an Asus Striker or EVGA ( both 680i chipset) which are pretty good OC'ers, although with less features and you can sometimes get a bad one, although the issues are less pronounced iirc. Then there's another factor - the next generation of nVidia mobo chipsets are out sometime soon (before Xmas iirc), which will bring more features, probably better OC'ing and give SLi capability. The problem with the boards I suggested above was that they're a fairly old chipset now, and the newest offerings from Intel (X38 and P35) are much better, but don't officially support SLi. (Don't know if you can get hacked drivers or not yet.)
hmm. well crysis is running nicely on my machine. so i think ill wait till xmas to upgrade the mobo then. next gen nvidia chipsets sounds like a plan! thanks for the help dude, youve single handedly tackled this one!
A pleasure sir. Hopefully the new 780's should be sorted by Xmas (most chipsets take a while to get their drivers and BIOS' properly sorted and performance to creep up to optimum.)
Intel will be releasing their new [Penryn] CPU's before the end of the year (/possibly at the end of this month?)... and there's also an updated version of the GTS being released soon as well (112 pipelines), so the price for your second current-gen GTS should drop a bit when the new variant is released? Two more reasons to hang-fire
This is IMO so please don't flame me LOL.....but honestly I don't see a reason to go the SLI route. By the time you want to buy a second card there will more than likely be a newer better card that will smoke both of the older cards in SLI and wouldn't cost much more than getting the second card. Plus an Intel chipset mobo will beat a Nvidia chipset mobo as far as head to head performance....simply because Intel is the one making the chips naturally they should be able to build the better chipset, which ATM they do. Plus on top of that running two cards increases power consumption and also increases the amount of heat inside the case. Then of course not all games are optimized to use SLI and just creates a headache just trying to get it to run right. There are two reasons to run SLI in a computer: 1) You have money burning a hole in your pocket and want to have the "bragging rights" 2) You want higher benchmark scores...which kinda goes hand in hand with the "bragging rights" thing....but if that is what gets you off is a higher benchmark score then go for it I guess lol edit: I also wouldn't try running two 8800GTS's with a 500w PSU. Thats kinda pushing the limits of the PSU I think.
I wouldn't say that at all - they're making better chipsets for this generation (i.e. P35 and X38 vs the 6x0's), but the next ones to come from nVidia are the 7x0's - don't judge a chipset before you've seen the numbers.
