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Mobo for Ivy Bridge & CF 7970s - Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H or other?

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CPUs Expert

Hi all,
So - I keep up with CPUs and GPUs well enough, but don't know enough about motherboards to make an informed purchase within the next month or two. I'm hoping to sell off my current phenom 960T and MSI 890fxa-gd65 and upgrade to Ivy Bridge. Could you recommend me a high end motherboard (~$150-200) that will go with a core i7-3770k (when released) and which will enable me to use crossfire 7970s with a slot or two of space inbetween them?

Definitely need an overclocking board, as I'll be looking to push the CPU as far as I can with my Hyper 212 Evo. Size isn't an issue - I'm gonna be putting this into a Storm Trooper case, so I don't care if the mobo is huge. Have looked briefly so far at some Z77 previews but don't know enough about motherboards to tell from previews what to get.

Less expensive is obviously better but I am willing to pay for quality as I have had boards explode on me in the past when they weren't up to the par needed to handle a high CPU OC. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks.

More about : mobo ivy bridge 7970s gigabyte z77x ud5h

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CPUs Expert

Third and final bump. Any boards out there look better than the Z77X-UD5H or G1.Sniper 3? Currently thinking I'll go for whichever of those I feel like I want to pay for.
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Motherboard Master
CPUs Master

Don't even think about getting IB + Z77 until you see reviews and benchmarks. Currently, the preview data suggests the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H either is crap or a sever BIOS issue -> http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/4619/ivy_bridge_previ...

Read my take on it -> http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/329828-28-bridge-cpus...

Otherwise it's like a Blind Dart player and anything now is wild guesses. I personally wouldn't even think about buying either the IB or Z77 until there's both more data AND (2) BIOS revisions!
CPUs Expert

jaquith said:
Don't even think about getting IB + Z77 until you see reviews and benchmarks. Currently, the preview data suggests the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H either is crap or a sever BIOS issue -> http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/4619/ivy_bridge_previ...

Read my take on it -> http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/329828-28-bridge-cpus...

Otherwise it's like a Blind Dart player and anything now is wild guesses. I personally wouldn't even think about buying either the IB or Z77 until there's both more data AND (2) BIOS revisions!


That's really helpful! Is there a nice Z68 mobo you could recommend that would handle IB and 2 7970s with some space between them?

:edit: Seems like tweaktown likes the z77x-ud5h:
Quote:
On the topic of the motherboard, the new GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H looks to be a great offering and when we get into the overclocking side of things we're really going to get a chance to see what it's made out off. Features are strong, though, and it hasn't skipped a single beat with our Ivy Bridge testing which is exactly what we love to see.


Am I missing something? :edit 2: Just saw that benchmark scores are slightly lower on the Z77 than with SB on Z68 - that's probably what you meant.
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CPUs Master

BigMack70 said:
Am I missing something? :edit 2: Just saw that benchmark scores are slightly lower on the Z77 than with SB on Z68 - that's probably what you meant.

Correct looking at the Gaming frame rates; 4.5% loss on the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H. Gigabyte has TweakTown in their back pocket so even if it had the worst scores they've seen they'd say it was great.

There's so little data on IB + Z77 that I'd be guessing, and I'd put the pause button 'on' before buying anything for an IB build, and as I said repeatably wait until there are a couple BIOS updates. Frankly, if I were to build a CF HD 7970 it wouldn't be on LGA 1155 and instead would be on LGA 2011. The only justification for CF HD 7970 are either on a 30" 2560 x 1600 or Triple 3x1920x1080 (5760+ x 1080) monitor(s).
CPUs Expert

Yeah the CF 7970s are more for fun than anything practical... just kinda want to do it for fun. It's massive overkill for anything I have except maybe to never see a BF3 framerate below 60 and (if they get the drivers working) to play The Witcher 2 with ubersampling at 60+fps. I'm sure that the games that need that kind of power at 1080p are a couple years out.

Why recommend a LGA 2011 board over a 1155? I was under the impression that the 3930k didn't really improve gaming performance that much, but it's twice as expensive as a 2600k. Anandtech's 3770k preview had the 3770 doing better than the 3960X in games I believe. That was my main reason for planning on IB over a 2500k or 2600k.
Motherboard Master
CPUs Master

You can get decent performance on an i3-2100, and negligible differences with any Intel 4-core. So why not really mismatch your rig with a cheapo i3-2100 or i5-2300?

I have an i7-3930K, so why would I want an i5-2500K or i7-2600K?

The LGA 2011 adds 6-core fully Hyper-Threaded support (6/12), native PCIe 3.0, 32-lanes PCIe to the GPUs, Quad-Channel, etc.

LGA 2011 on the cheap look at the i7-3820 you can OC (4.75GHz) it easy with CPU Strap i.e. 125 MHz.

You can argue every which way and Sunday, I always match all my components; i.e. good + good, cheap + cheap, great + great, etc...not e.g. good + overkill.
CPUs Expert

Hm.... I just don't do anything all that CPU-intensive (I don't think gaming really counts). I've been selling old stuff on ebay to get the $$ for the 2nd 7970, and plan to sell my current CPU-mobo to pick up a third to half of the cost of a (hypothetical) CPU upgrade.

So to upgrade to a ~$300 cpu + ~$150-200 mobo + 2nd 7970 is only gonna cost me about $300 out of pocket. The 3930k would double that to $600, and I just don't see it helping game performance all that much.

I understand the "matching" of components for overall system balance, but I'm just not convinced at this point that there's any reason to go LGA 2011 for gaming unless you're running 4 GPUs and need the extra PCI-e lanes.

I'll see what people over in the CPU forum have to say, and I'll wait it out for reviews of IB and Z77 mobos unless people convince me to just go ahead and get SB. I live near a microcenter so I could probably get a nice 2600k+Z68 mobo setup for like $400 or less.

Thanks for the thoughts!
Motherboard Master
CPUs Master

I build rigs and I am.

Folks have selective memory looking at benchmarks, they see only what they want to see. When they see the LGA 2011 beat the LGA 1155 by 4%~8% in one game and the i7-2600K match it in another all they see (remember) is matching numbers to justify their wallets.

Before, getting a second HD 7970 get yourself either 2x 128GB SSD (RAID 0) or 256GB SSD -- you'll see the advantages right off.

To 'me' a $300 CPU is cheap. It's a matter of perspective and use.

The cheapest decent match is an i7-2600K or i5-2500K and ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 or P8Z68-V/GEN3; both MOBO's are proven with 12 Phases to the CPU with ultra-low vCore.

Good Luck! :) 
CPUs Expert

Thanks - I'll keep that in mind and have some more looks around gaming benchmarks on LGA 2011.

I'd love to have the SSDs, but the problem is that I'm trying to piece together an enthusiast rig on an relatively limited budget... I don't have unlimited funds to throw at the rig; most of my current rig has been funded by gift cards and as I said - a big chunk of what I'd like to buy is being covered by selling off old tech on ebay.

I have 7 TB worth of external HDDs hooked up to the system that slow down the boot tremendously :(  ... so I'm putting off SSD purchases probably till this holiday season when I get some more newegg gift cards and prices are even lower so that I can get a 512 GB version for hopefully <=$500. It'll help application/game launch and load times but I think the overall responsiveness is going to be permanently slowed down as long as I've got so much of my data on external HDDs.
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