680i vs 750,780,790

Why do you want an SLI chipset when you are running a single card?

If you are stable at 4.2Ghz with an E8400 you should still be content. If you just have the need to upgrade wait 3 months and get a P55.

Hey Prox , thanks for the reply. At some point between now and move to I7 I will add another 260. I ran 2x9800GTX+ on this 680i and it sucked horribly. My decision to add another 260 is not what influeneced this inquiry though. The 750 boards are really cheap and the 780/790 are affordable. So , if I could net short term benefit for little out of pocket I would do it. I guess it's just the desire to change something.

Are they going to manufacture P55 boards for LGA775?

If you're stable then just leave it alone. 750i boards have fewer lanes. 780i/790i boards allow you to run two cards with two PCI-E 16x slots at 16x. You would see a slight increase with two PCI-E 2.0 16x lanes vs two PCI-E 1.0/1.1 lanes, if you were running the same two cards in SLI. For a single card configuration the difference is very very small. There is a small benefit to using DDR3 with the 790i board, but it's really not worth the cost. Also, if you get a new board there is no guarantee that it will be able to overclock as well as your current one leaving you worse off.

No, P55 is for the LGA 775 replacement, LGA 1156. It's supposed to support SLI.

EVGA is showing off their P55 already:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/EVGA-Classified-P55-GT...

The new CPUs:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=357...

Sept. 1st by all reports.

You're thinking of an upgrading to a newer generation chipset although 680i to 780i was possible 2 years ago. How big is your monitor and what resolution do you play in? Usually, upgrades are made to gain performance for a certain task. If what you have now is satisfactory, no lags in framerates or rendering times, then don't waste cash (or plastic credit) for a 2% gain that you won't notice.

I'm using an e8400 with a single GTX 260 on a 22" monitor after wasting cash on an SLI rig with 2 X 9800 GT's that doesn't perform as fast or smoothly as one card. My next upgrade will be more value minded to a core i5 that I will overclock and a 26" monitor. I'm expecting the GTX 260 will keep up but if I start seeing lags, then I'll wait to see what GPU's are available that will be a significant improvement. The GTX 275, 280, 285s aren't worth upgrading to. Maybe the GTX 295 in 6 months will cost less than $300?

IMO, upgrades that give less than 5 or even 10 percent improvement are a waste of cash and time.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13790/7

good article to compare performance between 680i and 780i.

The only reason I would change out what you have now if your happy with it is if your afraid of encountering the overclock bug. The 6xx series had a habbit of corrupting the SATA drives on overclocks. I believe a bios fix was released however, so you don't need to buy a new board to avoid it.

Swapping out the motherboard isn't really worth it. I would buy some things that will carry over to a new build. Buy a new case/PSU. Buy a nice chair. Perhaps you could use a new laser mouse, or upgrade your LAN to gigabit speeds. Uprading the motherboard to a new chipset isn't going to increase your benchmark scores that much. Buy something that matters while waiting for the next gen chips to come out. (matters and will carry over.)

I play on a 24" and am really happy with the performance. After considering your comments I will ride out this system "as is" until upgrade time.

As always thanks for the opinions.