Looking for a new Sandy Bridge motherboard

[Atham]

Hey,
I am currently looking for a sandy bridge supported motherboard. I will be using the i5 2500k processor and I am going to use the ATI Radeon 6950 GPU. I might want to do CrossFire.

I will be shopping from either www.shark.sk, www.alza.sk or www.agem.sk. The websites are in Slovak but there are some translating options on the sites.

I have some Motherboards in mind:

GIGABYTE P67A-D3-B3
GIGABYTE P67-DS3-B3
ASROCK P67 Extreme4 B3
ASROCK H67M-GE - would I be able to use a radeon hd 6950 2Gb with this one?
I am looking for a Motherboard that is not all that expensive. Maybe up to about 130 Euros. I might be overclocking.

Thanks in advance

 

[EXCellR8]

MSI have some decent P67 and Z68 boards available with UEFI BIOS.

And yes, you would be able to use that card on the ASRock, but you'd probably be happier with a full ATX board.

 

[Atham]

I would like to overclock too. Will the P67 or Z68 be good for OCing?

 

[dividebyzero]

If you're planning on overclocking -and why would you not if you've bought an unlocked multiplier CPU- then ditch the H67 from your evaluation. The H67 chipset doesn't allow for multiplier overclocking, nor for memory overclocking. I'm pretty sure that all the Sandy Bridge chipsets aside from Z68 and P67 are restricted to DDR3-1333

And yes, you would be able to use that card on the ASRock, but you'd probably be happier with a full ATX board.

The Extreme4 is an ATX board.
It also happens to be very well appointed, and a very good choice for the feature set on offer.

[Review 1], [Review 2]

 

[Atham]

Would the ASUS P8P67-M PRO (rev 3.0) be better then the Extreme4? ASUS P8P67-M PRO (rev 3.0) is cheaper than the Extreme4 in my country.

 

[dividebyzero]

Cheaper because it is an mATX board (four expansion slots). If you plan on using two graphics cards then they will be stacked on top of each other (unlike the full sized motherboards which have an extra slot width spacing). If you plan on using one graphics card then the board doesn't really lack anything that the full size board carries.

 

[Atham]

So the Aus P8P67 right?

 

[dividebyzero]

In relation to what ? Slot spacing ? Check the Asustek website. Here's the P8P67, the same basic layout and feature set can be applied to the Pro, EVO and Deluxe

 

[Atham]

Wait, I want to have Crossfire in the future then it will be more difficult?

 

[dividebyzero]

Three slot spacing (or more) between PCIe x16 slots is preferable for Crossfire if you're planning on using performance/enthusiast level cards (HD 6950/6970 for example). There's a possibility that the new HD 7000 series might run cooler than present cards...but I doubt whether any card that aims at high-level desktop gaming and compute abilities is going to be a cool running card that doesn't require a reasonable amount of airflow.

Of course, if you plan on Crossfiring lower tier cards, single slot designs or using watercooling then the matter is moot...but you were the poster who started up threads regarding 6950/6970...cards not known for their low temps.