Having Problems Choosing a MB to go with a AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE

1st off, I've owned a lot of Nvidia products, starting from the TNT & TNT2, to the original Geforce, My favorite was a Geforce 3ti that eventually died on me, oh and lets not forget my solid gold CHAINTECH geforce 4, that thing was awesome, now it's an artifact. My point is, I've owned both families of cards and i can honestly say not 1 of my ATI products have ever failed, while a few of my Nvidia products have. I am blown away by the ati6870 I currently own.

That said, I'd ask what's your price point for a Motherboard? I built a dozen or so machines in the past year using Gigabyte boards with AMD 7 series chipsets & just recently upgraded (if you can call it that) to a 890FX. For $140 or so I think you could get a biostar 890fx board from newegg, but if you went with a board that has integrated graphics, you can completly disable it, so I dont see any need for worries there, and if you must buy Nvidia, just buy a single, high-end solution to achieve the performance you want.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=E...

when it comes to performance, in my opinion, you wont see much difference betweens the 7series vs. the 8 series, just a few more bells & whistles.

My current build is the

gigabyte890fxa-ud5
PhenomII965 (3rd different board, OC results are all the same @4GHz top speed)
Corsair XMS3 @1740MHz 9-9-9-24-1t
saphire 6870 (1020core, 1205mem)
WD 1TB Sata3 Black edition HD

3dmark '06 22k+
3dmark vantage 16.4k

No 7XX or 8XX Boards support SLi only old Nvidia chipsets

You can run a single Nvidia card in the motherboards with AMD chipsets with no problems, you should just turn off the onboard video in the BIOS...

But you can't run an SLI setup with an AMD CPU unless you get an outdated motherboard..... For some reason, Nvidia stopped making AMD chipsets?

I have a couple of suggestions.
If you aren't interested in onboard video ( I don't blame you) look at the AMD 870 series chipsets. Asus and Gigabyte have good boards, Asrock has some nice budget models. Only go for 890FX if you want a top o the line board with crossfire.

For sli, you have to look at the 980a chipsets from nVidia, there aren't a lot of options. I typically recommend pairing AMD chipsets with ati cards, but my wife runs a 8800GT on a AMD board with no problems. Yes, integrated video too.

Its true, there are occasions when the Catalyst drivers don't play nice with Nvidia. And nVidia is out of the chipset business now. For the foreseeable future, sli will only be supported by Intel chipsets.

I also respectfully suggest Ati (now AMD) is a different company with very reliable and competitive products. You may wish to give them another chance, that is my recommendation anyway if you like AMD cpu's/motherboards.

Oh, there is another option that seems unproven at this point--msi's Fuzion products. They claim to be able to mix and match nVidia and AMD cards. Reviews I have seen have not shown this tech is ready for primetime, but you might want to research it yourself.

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

The 980a chipset is newer.

I was honestly just useing SLi as a generic reference to multi card machine either Nvidia or ATI and my past nightmare was in the Windows MC all in wonder cards from ati befor the AMD buy out and Yes I have owned 3 other ati cards prior to that the ones on par witht he tnt and the mx440 series. I am looking to sped a total for MB CPU PS Case hd / cd rom 600 and drop 200 on a card afterwards. I just saw this week a Dual GPU nvidia card so now I am teetering on waiting and geting one of those instead of trying to run 2 cards. I need to do more research and see what ati has in the dual gpu cards. I have seen sli and amd nvidia stoped making chipsets and thats sad I loved teaming them up together. I realy wanted to use the 965 BE for its ob chip memory controller. Its cheaper than a I7 for the same feature and I like the OC tool I been reading up on from the 890FX chipset. Anyway thanks to everyone who has posted comments I have taken the information down and read read read more and more information. I am not realy brand loyal with motherboards but I have used alot fo ASUS boards and a few MSI boards I have only heard bad thing from people word of mouth on gigabyte I havent tried to use one of thier product myself so I dont know if they are going to be a nightmare or not. And right now I am not seeing alot of choices on motherboard have we hit a pause in MB creation for the next pivitol release of new goodness. I surfd new egg tigerdirect amazon and a few others I am only seeing 3-4 motherboards with amd chipsets in the 7 and 8 family and even less with the 890fx.