Swapping out old for new (Partial Rebuild)

jfitz90

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Jul 31, 2010
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Just ordered these parts off Newegg to replace my old stuff.

AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)

ASUS M4N98TD EVO AM3 NVIDIA nForce 980a SLI ATX AMD Motherboard

Correct me if I'm wrong. If the mobo is branded for SLI as this one is, you can't us CrossFire on it can you?

Other than that what do you guys think...?
 
Solution
You can always use Crossfire. I will caution you that AMD SLI boards typically don't have the best quality and can cause issues. In addition, they're overly pricey and missing key features (USB 3/SATA III foremost). I would have gotten a regular AMD board (the ASRock 870 Extreme3 is great, as is the Gigabyte GA-890XA-UD3) and gone with any of ATI's amazing offerings. Really, nothing nVidia has is really worth it.

Also, there are a lot of different Ripjaw sticks. Which did you get? I'm hoping the CAS Latency 7 ones. Even then, these G.Skill Ecos would have been better for roughly the same price.
You can always use Crossfire. I will caution you that AMD SLI boards typically don't have the best quality and can cause issues. In addition, they're overly pricey and missing key features (USB 3/SATA III foremost). I would have gotten a regular AMD board (the ASRock 870 Extreme3 is great, as is the Gigabyte GA-890XA-UD3) and gone with any of ATI's amazing offerings. Really, nothing nVidia has is really worth it.

Also, there are a lot of different Ripjaw sticks. Which did you get? I'm hoping the CAS Latency 7 ones. Even then, these G.Skill Ecos would have been better for roughly the same price.
 
Solution

jfitz90

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The mobo has enough features like eSATA and built in raid controller. I can always add on a USB 3.0 card later (right? lol). The board was on sale as an open box and I mainly bought it because of the two PCI-E 2.0 keeping the bandwidth at x16/x16. My hard drives are not SATA III ready and I have no plans to upgrade them as of right now as both are running fine.

Unfourtunately the CAS timings on these are 9-9-9-24. Should I RMA once I get them?
 
You can add a SATA III/USB 3 card later, but it won't be as good as having it on the motherboard. I also wouldn't count out not wanting to upgrade to SATA III. Storage is the single largest bottleneck in terms of across the board performance despite it not effecting gaming and other tasks. Upgrading to a faster HDD makes the entire system seem brand new.

You do realize that 16x/16x means absolutely nothing right? It avoids a 3% (if that) performance loss, and that's only with the most massive GPUs out there. It's widely considered a waste of money to chase a 16x/16x board.

I wouldn't bother RMAing it. It's not a big deal, but the price difference between CL 9 and CL 7 is so small that it's worth it to get the tighter timings.