Choosing a P55 motherboard on budget

[myrmidonks]

Is it worth it to save money on a mobo that isnt x8 x8 and just get one pcie, with say a 5850, which would cost the same as two 5770s? Were not going to be playing games at high resolutions, at least no more than 1920x1080. The 5850 is actually quite expensive right now, for what it was originally supposed to cost (mid-high 200 dollars) from what I have heard. Maybe once the 6850 comes out the 5850 will drop down enough to get a second and then CFX them.

 

[myrmidonks]

In regards to ssd's, We are not gong to be able to spend a whole lot of money on them, so from what you all have discussed, it seems that only high end ssds take advantage of SATA 3 (am i correct?). It seems that for a boot drive the SATA 3 won't be neessary...

 

[red1776]

Is it worth it to save money on a mobo that isnt x8 x8 and just get one pcie, with say a 5850, which would cost the same as two 5770s?

The 5770's in crossfire outperform the 5850, and by a significant margin. as has been stated several times, you will not lose any performance with the pcie x8's and if you are waiting for the 6000 series to drop the prices of the 5850 to crossfire it...what good does a single PCIE board do?

 

[dividebyzero]

Is it worth it to save money on a mobo that isnt x8 x8 and just get one pcie, with say a 5850, which would cost the same as two 5770s? Were not going to be playing games at high resolutions, at least no more than 1920x1080. The 5850 is actually quite expensive right now, for what it was originally supposed to cost (mid-high 200 dollars) from what I have heard. Maybe once the 6850 comes out the 5850 will drop down enough to get a second and then CFX them.

If the 5850 is significantly cheaper than dual 5770's then it becomes a viable option, although if they are similarly priced then the crossfired 5770's (which offer 5870 level performance) are pretty much a no-brainer unless the setup:
a. Deprives you of PCI/PCIe slots that you need
b. You feel uncomfortable with AMD's Crossfire driver profiles

The other (much cheaper) option is to buy a single HD 5770 first and see whether it's performance level is acceptable. I think you will be surprised by it's level of gaming ability at 1920x1080, and if the plan is to upgrade when Southern Islands debuts in a few months time (either by buying a 6xxx series card or buying a 5850/5870 from someone upgrading) then selling one 5770 to help fund the purchase is likely to be easier than selling two.

In regards to ssd's, We are not gong to be able to spend a whole lot of money on them, so from what you all have discussed, it seems that only high end ssds take advantage of SATA 3 (am i correct?). It seems that for a boot drive the SATA 3 won't be neessary...

I'll refer you to the first sentance in my original post (emphasis added)

I'd personally look at a board with USB3/SATA6Gb functionality if your friend is planning to keep the core of his system for any great length of time.

While USB 3 and SATA 6Gb are far from a big deal now, tech has a habit of moving as fast as Oprah at a smorgasboard. If you plan on upgrading on a regular basis then I wouldn't worry about USB3/SATA6Gb inclusion. If, however, you plan on keeping the core of the system intact for 2-3 years then the added functionality is likely to be of benefit down the road.
Bear in mind that Intel's next chipsets (Sandy Bridge LGA1155 and LGA2011) are only incremental advances over this generations P55/X58- basically a move to the 32nm process from the current 45nm- so if you're buying a fully featured P55/X58 chipset board now then you are future proofed for 2+ years until the PCIe 3.0 specification becomes mainstream, both for chipset and graphics card. And as you can see from the PCI SIG website, PCI-E 3.0 has still got a little ways to go before the final specification is set.

 

[captaincranky]

Here are the Newegg search results for SSDs, 100 to 200 dollars. The read and write speeds are all over the map, as are the capacities. The only thing that is conclusive is that none of them, acting alone, can exceed the 300Gbs SATA 2 spec.

However, many of the read speed are way good, and any system would boot up blazingly fast with most of them. Now where to put the rest your s***, that's another matter.

But, I've determined in my own completely unscientific manner that you should buy a SATA 6Gbs board, for the always present and very primal reason, "because you can".

 

[CMH]

Even in RAID 0, SSDs that are affordable to most of us will not saturate SATA 2

Hmm.... My understanding of RAID systems just isn't up to scratch, but isn't the port speed (ie, SATA2) is only pertinent to the drive it is connected to, and the speed of the whole RAID array is dependant on the RAID chip itself, or the total bandwidth available to the Northbridge?

I had an impression (from some quick googling sometime back) that the ICH10 northbridge is the bottleneck to RAID systems, with a max of some 666MB/sec, which is easily reached with 3 medium-end SSDs in RAID 0.

Also, SATA 2 bandwidth is about 375MB/sec, and most medium-end SSDs (I consider most Indilinx Barefoot based drive as medium-end) are between 250-300 MB/sec, which is really close in the world of computing IMO, with "speeds doubling every 18 months" (misquoting for effect). With the new Intel 25nm flash mem, there should be a healthy jump in data density and speeds (and power consumption, and a whole host of other stuff most of us probably won't give a hoot about) coming soon in the world of SSDs.