LGA 1155 motherboard under $130

In the price range you are looking at I would look at the ASRock Z68 Extreme3 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... I think a lot of us really like this board for its value and features.


Christain Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

Yes, I own the ASROCK Extreme3 Gen3 LGA 1155 board and I love it. It overclocks well and supports all the SLi/CF support with 8x/8x. It can be found on Newegg for $120.

I have a couple options (from Newegg) for you, without knowing what form factor you need.

ASUS P8Z68-M Pro MicroATX Motherboard for $125

MSI Z68MA-G45 MicroATX Motherboard for $98 after MIR

MSI P67A-GD53 ATX Motherboard for $110 after MIR

GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3 ATX Motherboard for $130 after MIR

All these motherboards have either the Z68 or P67 chipset. both enable overclocking with the Core i5 2500K processor. The only difference is that the Z68 chipset also allows you to use the processor's built-in graphics if you wish. That shouldn't make too much difference as you are looking to run discrete GPUs in SLI.

I personally prefer ASUS and MSI motherboards, but I have heard some good things about GIGABYTE as a manufacturer.

One last note: The ASUS motherboard supports Crossfire for sure, but I haven't been able to verify that it supports SLI. The MSI and GIGABYTE motherboards support both SLI and Crossfire technologies according to the specs sheets on their respective manufacturers' websites.

ok wow thanks for all the replies. Ya im looking for a full size board. I really like the asrock one im just a little concerned with reliability and tech support! it sounds like a really dont' need a z68 board cause a p67 would work just fine?

I p67 would work fine, but if you can get a z68, that is the way to go. What is wrong with ASROCK tech support? I have never heard anything bad about them.

EDIT: Also, the ASROCK is a ATX board, but it missing an inch in width.

ok then i think that the asrock would be the best one for me. although will the missing an inch in width mess anything up?i mean i have a cooler master haf 912 case so it should fit!

ok so if and or when i get this motherboard and cpu. Will i pretty much just put it into my case. plug my ssd into it, then just do a clean install of win 7 oem?

Nope, missing an inch won't matter, unless you are using a massive cooler, just have some low profile RAM.

Yes. You will be operating with a new Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) so you will have to reinstall Windows.

As far as the plug-and-play road with the SSD, I haven't gotten the chance to upgrade yet, so I don't know from experience. I haven't read anything anywhere that indicated this wouldn't work. Worst case scenario you would just have to pre-load some drivers to a flash drive and tell the windows installation where to find them (similar to how you would have to do an F6 drivers install in Windows XP with a SATA HDD in AHCI mode).

ok cool thanks! wow this was my first forum post to toms and talk about fast responses! you guys are awesome!

No problem! Any more questions, just come right back!  

Take a look at this MOBO: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

I used a Biostar MOBO and it is very reliable and suit my needs. Easy for CPU overclocking. Very nice UEFI BIOS and easy to navigate.

But those PCI-E lanes are 16x/4x. He wants SLi and that wouldn't give him the performance he wants I don't think.

can one of yall explain to me exactly what "true" sli is? like i have an MSI gtx 560 and if i get this asrock board could i get another gtx 560 and run them in sli?

SLi is just running two GPUs. PCI-E lanes had bandwidth. The bigger the bandwidth, the more information can travel through it. It is like a road. you have a road that is a 16x, but now you need two roads (for two cards), so some boards will just add another 4x road (which can make you lose performance because it cannot take all the data you want to run through it), but then some split into two 8x roads like the ASROCK board does. 8x is more than enough "road space" to handle any single GPU card.

Also, if you ever get an IB CPU, you will have PCI-E 3.0, which doubles the bandwidth.

What I am trying to get at if it didn't make sense is, you are fine with the ASROCK.  

ok awesome!!! thanks!

No problem!  

ok one more question to run by you guys. Will my ram work just fine if i get the asrock board with a 2500k and i overclock it? my current ram is 4gb of corsair XMS3 1333 ddr3 memory. I got it like 2yrs ago.. still works fine in my current system..

i think this is the link to the memory. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Yup, you can overclock. For a gaming machine with a 64-bit OS, I would suggest getting 4gb more RAM. By the way, machines don't overclcok with 4 RAM slots taken as well as they do with only two. You maybe be a able an 8gb kit for pretty cheap that only takes two slots. Just a thought though.

ok awesome!! thanks again!

No problemo!