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Best Xfire Mobo under 150$ US

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What graphics cards are you planning on crossfiring? If you plan on using the 4870x2, then you'll want to step it up to the x48 board. Otherwise a p45 will do the trick.
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Kubes, You information is pure crap.....

UD3R doesn't even have 2 PCI-E X 16 slots. How do you plan to install 2 cards in a single PCI-E X 16 slot?

xxZABxx, get a Gigabye GA-EP45-UD3P. This version will allow crossfire and it is an amazing board for OC'ing.

My 0.02$: why not just get the X2 version of whatever card you want, you won't save money, but the perform a bit better than actual XFired card and you save yourself the trouble of finding a good XFire board ...
Homebuilt system Master

jeep11 said:
P5Q it's an ASUS which means max stability and easy to use.

You can say the same thing about the GA-EP45-UD3P. These new Gigabyte boards are rock solid. Both are good boards, but I'd personally pick the Gigabyte.

Thanks for all the info. And thnx for the hint about the software if I go gigabyte. Always love forums like these. People, usually, are so helpful because its a topic every one on here is passionate about.

~ Z :bounce: 

Shadow703793 said:
Also add to the list of DS3R and P5Q the P45-UD3P.

Note: If getting any Gigabyte boards, DO NOT install the DES software.


What's that software supposed to do? Why not install it?

xxzabxx said:
Looking for some info on the best Crossfire ready Mobo under 150$ us.

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale will be the chip-set. Will be OC-ing.

Thats about it.


The absolute best value in a Crossfire motherboards is the ASRock P45XE. Look at Tom's Hardware reviews for more information. $95 gets you a board that automatically switches to 2x x8 transfers in 2.0 mode, which is fast enough for nearly any single-GPU graphics card.
Homebuilt system Expert

^ Link?

aevm said:
What's that software supposed to do? Why not install it?

It's Dynamic Energy Saving (aka DES) software. It reduces voltages to NB/SB,etc in order to save power. BUT as many know reducing NB or other voltages isn't a good idea while a PC is running (kind of like OCing via Windows is bad) as it can lead to BSODs,etc.

Zenthar said:
My 0.02$: why not just get the X2 version of whatever card you want, you won't save money, but the perform a bit better than actual XFired card and you save yourself the trouble of finding a good XFire board ...


I think this is a good suggestion.
A non-XFire board is actually a little less and an X2 Card will be faster than Two Single Cards.

Noya said:
If you want full x16 lanes (not one x16 & one x8) you need an x38 or higher motherboard:

$159 x38
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
$105 open box deal
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

$128 Open box x48
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...



It's even worse, actually.There's no such thing as "one x16 & one x8". Some manufacturers spread this confusion because it's to their advantage, or because their PR people don't know better. The chipset has a total of 16 PCI-E lanes. They can work in two modes: 16x+0x (one slot empty) and 8x+8x (both slots filled). You just can't get 16x+8x at the same time from a total of 16.
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14847

aevm said:
It's even worse, actually.There's no such thing as "one x16 & one x8". Some manufacturers spread this confusion because it's to their advantage, or because their PR people don't know better. The chipset has a total of 16 PCI-E lanes. They can work in two modes: 16x+0x (one slot empty) and 8x+8x (both slots filled). You just can't get 16x+8x at the same time from a total of 16.
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14847



And this is moot for any newer motherboard anyway since they are all running PCIe 2.0 and even an 8x 2.0 slot will give plenty of bandwidth. It might be cutting it close for some of the X2 cards though.

zenmaster said:
Depends on the Setup.

Tweaktown which used higher graphic settings showed more of a difference.

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1472/10/intel_p45_vs_...

If running 4870s, I would definitely not want x8/x8.
With the 4830s/4850s its less of an issue.



Thats interesting because ive seen tests with 16x slots using PCIe 1.1, and it doesnt bottle neck the 4870 at all. Considering the 8x 2.0 slot has the same exact bandwidth there has to be something else thats going on causing that..

I think that when using XFire (or even SLI), both card also communicate with each other using the PCI-e bus so 2 cards might actually use more bandwidth that the sum they would use individually. I think that was the whole point of the extra communication bus between the GPUs in the newer X2 cards from ATI.

zenmaster said:
Depends on the Setup.

Tweaktown which used higher graphic settings showed more of a difference.

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1472/10/intel_p45_vs_...

If running 4870s, I would definitely not want x8/x8.
With the 4830s/4850s its less of an issue.


Wrong:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-pci-expre...

You linked to an article based on a broken configuration. Here's a quote from the author of Tom's Hardware's article:

Quote:
The P45 motherboard (tweaktown) used had a PCIe hub that allows the v2.0 pathways to be split across four slots, so like I said, maybe there was something wrong with their P45 configuration. It also appears that they were using a very old Beta version of ATI Catalyst which was known to be problematic with some HD 4xxx cards in CrossFire, so the thing that was wrong may have been software as well. At any rate, people should question the relevance of any crossfire articles using Catalyst version prior to 8.8


Like I said, the best value Crossfire motherboard for single-GPU cards is the ASRock P45XE:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-p45-core,2110...

blackened144 said:
Thats interesting because ive seen tests with 16x slots using PCIe 1.1, and it doesnt bottle neck the 4870 at all. Considering the 8x 2.0 slot has the same exact bandwidth there has to be something else thats going on causing that..



You're right! The tweaktown article is borked, and anyone who has seen the evidence and still links to it cannot be trusted as a source of quality information.

Inter card communication is done through the SLI or Crossfire bridges. Crossfire can be run without the bridges, but then it will eat into the PCIe bandwidth effecting performence. I think SLI requires the bridge to run in SLI mode.

All right, I promise I'll never link that tweaktown article again :) 

So, is there any advantage at all from an X48 over P45? Should anybody spend the extra $100 for an X48, or not really?

aevm said:
All right, I promise I'll never link that tweaktown article again :) 

So, is there any advantage at all from an X48 over P45? Should anybody spend the extra $100 for an X48, or not really?


Yes, you should run full x16 slots to any dual-GPU cards.
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