Best Mobo for Phenom II X4 940 with DDR2-1066 and SLI

Can't do it  

Get a single nVidia card or go ATI  

Or spend a bit more and get an X58 board and a faster i7 920.

Awesome Asus motherboard for crossfire and the phenom II 940
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.165049

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 4870 1GB Awesome Card  
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102801

I don't think an EVGA board is made that supports SLI and AMD. There isn't one listed on their site at least.

Jared,
That is a Crossfire board, correct? So I can't SLI with it?
Am I just better off picking Intel+nVidia or AMD+ATI??

i think these days to get the most performance for your money its best to go with amd + ati, nvidia has been making junk chipsets lately but pretty good gpus, but ati has started to take over the gpu market crossfire has become a very popular term these days.
and no you cant sli with it, and to be honest i was an nvidia fan for a long while and wouldnt settle for anything else, but after doing the research i found that ati is the best way to go these days.

I currently have an ATI video card, but the one I had before this was an nVidia. The reason I prefer nVidia to ATI is purely the drivers. I think nVidia has a much better handle on that. In fact, the reason I wanted to go with an nVidia is because I dislike CCC so much. However, I haven't bought a new video card in some years (I still have AGP), so maybe they've gotten better about it since then?

I thought I posted this, but it must have been dropped.

nVidia HAS announced a new SLI chipset for am2/AM3. It's called the 980a and is not available yet. It may or may not be worthwhile... I saw some comments that the onboard cooling needs improvement just like the 790i.

absolutely man i think its worlds better then they were

My 4870 is rock solid and fast, not to mention running cool.

Sweet guys, thanks alot! If you don't mind I'll ask a couple more questions pertaining to my new build, but not directly associated with processor/mobo compatibility.

How do all of these parts look as a $1000 budget build?

CPU/Mobo combo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?Ite...
CPU cooler: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
Memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
Video card (future crossfire?): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
HDD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
PSU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
Case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
Fans: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
DVD burner: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Of course I'll get some Arctic Silver 5 and some extra cables to connect the fans, but other than that how does it look? Any ideas/suggestions?

Thanks!!

I'm sure the board is nice. Don't install the ASUS utility junk though.

Spend a bit more and get a high quality cooler. There is no reason not to at least bump your multiplier up a bit.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Unless you really want green colored RAM, this has the same specs and is cheaper:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Otherwise go for the high quality stuff:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Wrong link on the GPU.

This combo is really nice, and this case is better cooled and roomier than the Antec 300:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?Ite...
You can drop the fans that way too.

For the money today, I think this is the best bang for the buck:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?Ite...
Ummm... check that combo. You might want to snap that up now. Gotta be a misprint. That's practically a free 640GB drive.

Yeah I pretty much decided to go for all that stuff except I picked the Patriot over the G Skill memory. I don't need crazy ram, I've lived with 166mhz PC2700 for five years, I doubt I'll be able to tell the difference between the two you recommended. I also hope that the HUGE cpu cooler you persuaded me to choose won't block ALL of my dimm slots!
Thank you again so much for all of your help!!

P.S. I fixed the link before you replied, but apparently you still got the bad one. Oh, and just for the record I'm not planning on building this for a few months due to lack of funds right now. So hopefully some prices will go down or I'll be able to add an upgrade here and there for the same price!

Get an Asrock K10N780SLIX3-WiFi. It supports 2 and 3 way sli, ddr2-1066 and the phenom II 940. I use it and its a very good board for its price. It is also a very good board for overclocking. i run my cpu at 4.5ghz on it.

rav3n,
I looked at that board and I decided against it because of its limited SLI compatibility with the majority of nVidia manufacturers. In actuality, there are only 4 cards on the SLI compatible list and only two of them are the GTX series, as you can see here: http://www.asrock.com/mb/vga.asp?c=SLI3&Model=K10N780SL...
If I went with nVidia I would want an EVGA card because they are known to be high quality and high performance.
However, thank you for your input and if you have any other ideas please post them!

@bmbvenom

Thats only a list of cards they tested. I have a friend that runs evga gtx 280's in sli and i run 2 inno3d gtx260's without problem. And to be completely honest sli is a total waste of money. You will rarely see much of a performance gain anyway as most games don't support multi gpu's. You would be much better just getting a high end card then wasting your money on sli.  

If you want to future proof it then the 920 AM3 is coming out soon and ddr3 is getting pretty cheap now. Only part that would up the price would be the mobo.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought you couldn't use DD3 RAM with a PII X4 940.... is this a misconception?

New DDR3 Phenom IIs are coming. PII 945 or some such. I'm skeptical about them being any better, but we may see fairly soon.

Does anyone have a rough time frame or price estimate on the new DDR3 Phenom IIs?
I can't find anything about them on the AMD site....

http://www.techpowerup.com/82345/Phenom_II_X4_950_On_Th...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...


Very good AM3 board, and cheeper than the one you listed, although you will not be able to SLI but you could do crossfire in the future.


Also any of the newer Phenom II's support both DDR2 or DDR3


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/socket-am3-phenom,2...

Here is a AM3 processor AMD Phenom II X3 720 with both DDR2 or DDR3 support, its only a tri core but is a very good value.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Here is a pretty good read on the AMD Phenom II X3 720

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3533&p=1

If you wanted ddr3 my suggestion would be to wait until the new am3 cpu's and am3 mobo's come out. The current am3 boards don't show much of a performance gain over the am2+ boards. Or you could always build a core i7 system like i am preparing to do...  

If you wanted ddr3 my suggestion would be to wait until the new am3 cpu's and am3 mobo's come out. The current am3 boards don't show much of a performance gain over the am2+ boards. Or you could always build a core i7 system like i am preparing to do...  

If you wanted ddr3 my suggestion would be to wait until the new am3 cpu's and am3 mobo's come out. The current am3 boards don't show much of a performance gain over the am2+ boards. Or you could always build a core i7 system like i am preparing to do...  

I don't have the cash for an i7 build; I'm on somewhat of a budget and I can't blow a third of the money I have on my processor =P
Maybe I'll just wait for the new AM3 processors come out and grab one of those...

True luckily the i7 system i'll be building is for a client that doesn't care how much money it costs. I would say just wait for the am3 phenom II 945. It's clocked a bit higher at 3.25(correct me if im wrong) and go for one of the new asus am3 mob's that will be out in the near future. Also corsair xms3 ram is looking pretty cheap (about $165AUD for 3gig kit) so now could be a good time to start getting parts together. The main thing to remember when building a new system is that every dollar you save on one part is money that can be spent on another part.

According to the link Proximon posted, it's only supposed to be 3.0 GHz....




Also, newegg has quite a few 6GB sets of DDR3 for less than $100USD, are these of inferior quality or is the price of DDR3 just going down?

Ok i was sure that i read somewhere that the am3 version of the phenomII 940 was clocked at 3.25 but anyway thats why they made overclocking. What brands are the ddr3 kits or do you have a link to the page there on?

Ok i was sure that i read somewhere that the am3 version of the phenomII 940 was clocked at 3.25 but anyway thats why they made overclocking. What brands are the ddr3 kits or do you have a link to the page there on?

Ok i was sure that i read somewhere that the am3 version of the phenomII 940 was clocked at 3.25 but anyway thats why they made overclocking. What brands are the ddr3 kits or do you have a link to the page there on?

The sub-$100 DDR3 is fine. Prices are just coming down.

well this actually a nice kit of ram id say it might justbe beneficial to go am3 at this point
Patriot Viper 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)

combo deals aside ill compare an am2+ setup with the 720 be and an am3

AM2+ With DDR2

Motherboard = GIGABYTE GA-MA790GP-UD4H AM2+/AM2 AMD 790GX $138.99

Processor = AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8GHz 3 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 $135.99

Memory = Patriot Viper 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) $69.99

Total = 344.97

AM3 With DDR3

Motherboard = GIGABYTE GA-MA790XT-UD4P AM3 DDR3 AMD 790X $139.99

Processor = AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8GHz 3 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 $135.99

Memory = Patriot Viper 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) $98.99

Total = $368.97

Exactly a $24 Dollar Difference Using Essentially The Same Standard Of Components.