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Best Crossfire Mobo for the New Cards

Forum Motherboards & Memory : General Motherboard - Best Crossfire Mobo for the New Cards

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Hello all. I have been a fan of nVidia's video cards for the longest time, but have no real loyalty to any specific company for any components, so I was always prepared to betray nVidia if the right Radeon came along. I saw some good cards come along, and now, on the verge of my new build the HD 4870 XOC from Diamond has me completely infatuated and is breaking my streak of nVidia cards (for now, at least). I hate to admit this, but as I haven't used Radeon cards (or Intel boards, for that matter) in so long, I have totally lost touch with the current offerings for ATI chipsets. If you could all kindly reccomend to me a good crossfire board for my new system, I would be most appreciative. I am looking for something easy to OC on, supports Intel 775, and which is not overly pricey. As Newegg does not stock the XOC, I was hoping to find one offered by Tigerdirect, where I will be buying the card. Thanks to everyone in advance

The rest (probably)
Antec 900
q6600@?
Antec Earthwatts 650w
Blu-ray burner
Diamond HD 4870 XOC
6GB corsair pc-6400
WD Velociraptor
Vista Ultimate 64-bit

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Define pricey.

Your chipset choices are:

P45 Great OCer $130 - $250 but not great in crossfire at very high resolutions. Runs a single card at x16, but once you add a second card the two PCI-E slots go to x8 each... not as bad as it sounds but definitely a problem if you have a very large monitor.

x38 $180-$280 Probably not as good at OC but better performer at very high resolutions. You won't get all the features of the x48

x48 best performance but at a price. Pretty good at OC. You'll get all the bells and whistles from a top-end board.

If you want to run at 2560x1600 then you probably want an x48 or x38.

If you only need 1680x1050 a P45 will do fine.

Also, your PSU choice will likely not run two 4870s well

I'm going to guess that you want the ASUS Rampage:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131284

Message edited by Proximon on 08-04-2008 at 04:22:35 AM

Reply to Proximon

Even a P45 based board should have plenty of bandwidth due to its use of PCI-E 2.0 which basically means each 8x slot is as fast as a 16x PCI-E 1.x slot. The Gigabyte EP45-DS3R is a good cheap Xfire board, but based on the rest of your parts I get the feeling you'll probably go for something higher end.

-mcg

Reply to MrCommunistGen

x48 is where you want to be for CF, be ready to pay a pretty penny though

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131284

i have x38 maximus formula, pretty much the younger brother... its great you'll love it

Reply to eklipz330

Hey, thanks a lot for all the suggestions, guys, I will probably be buying http://www.tigerdirect.com/applica [...] CatId=1533 as it has 2x PCI-e and is priced where I wanted it ($229), hell, it even comes with G.R.A.W 2. And just for the record, I know my PSU could *never* support 4870 Xfire, but I won't be using it right away, I just wanted a Xfire mobo so I could expand in a few years.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to xeab

That's a great looking board! Let us know how it works out, we do not get enough feedback on Intel here.

Reply to Proximon

xeab wrote :

you know what... that was the board i was looking for about 4 months... and after months of researching, i opted against it

some general (not all) reasons why i wanted intel's dx38bt motherboard:
- intel's bulletproof quality and reliability
- ddr3
- crossfire support (x16 both slots)
- 1333mhz FSB
- x38 chipset

some general (not all) reasons why i didnt wanted intel's dx38bt motherboard anymore:
- my budget got smaller
- there are many other companies who offer intel's x38 chipset (with more features at the same time cheaper)
- i wanted solid state capacitors
- i realized that ddr3 is a waste of money (this is the factor that pushed me over the edge - essentially the deciding factor of why i opted against the dx38bt)

by all means, if you dont care about ur budget, then go for the dx38bt.. you'll be getting intel's quality anyways.. the bottom line - i opted against dx38bt because of the cost....
you can find plenty of x38 based boards with ddr2 ram (which basically performs the same as ddr3 as of now) and save yourself some money (ddr3 makes the dx38bt pricey)

Reply to ironsung

You know Iron, it's really funny, because I totally agree and disagree at the same time. I understand everything you are saying, and you are right, there are just some reasons I decided on that board. For me, $229 isn't too great of a price to pay for future-proof components. I won't be using DDR3 right away, probably OCZ platinum PC2-8500 (1066Mhz), but I hope to have this mobo for a few years, and I would like to have the option to expand to DDR3 when the price drops a little. Also, I've already said the term "brand loyalty" isn't in my lexicon, but, even though I wouldn't call myself "loyal" to Intel, I think they build boards that really are worth the extra money that you pay. Like I said, I want a few years out of this PC, so it's a crossfire PCI-e 2.0 board, the 4870 (should Xfire with 4870x2 later on... we'll see), and DDR3 support to prevent me from spending more money later on. Thanks for the input though. By the way, which board did you end up buying?

Reply to xeab

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