4870 Crossfire Mobo

[mojito_619]

Hi all, I'm going to build a new rig in the next few months, researched all the parts and everything. I was just reviewing my motherboard specs ( Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P) when I saw that it had 1 PCI-E x16 and the other at 8x. I was planning on buy a 4870 then another in a year when games got hungrier. The prob is that when i do go crossfire my gpus will be working with 8x slots instead of 16x. Will this affect performance by a large margin, if so could you recommend another motherboard that's not to expensive (around the same price as the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P)

Thx for the help,
Mojito

 

[Proximon]

No, it will not effect performance much at all.

You will see a lot of old info on the web contradicting that, but it's old. TH did a new crossfire comparison around January that revealed that the mature drivers from ATI and the motherboard folks had brought the performance almost exactly even to the X48 boards.

Add to that the superior speed and performance of the UD3P, and you have a clear winner. It's simply the best non-X58 Intel board you can get.
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3508&p=12

 

[mojito_619]

Thx Proximon, nearly had a heart attack there. You saved me a lot of researching time and money.

 

[Proximon]

I wish I could have linked the article to you. It seems to have disappeared. Chris C. actually linked it for me in a discussion we had recently, but the link was broken, LOL.

I'm going to message him now and see if he can't resurrect it.