Motherboard SLI/Crossfire support

princeton · Feb 11, 2010

dividebyzero said: ↑

There's no real performance penalty for running SLI (or Crossfire) in x8,x8 mode. Very few cards (HD 5970, GTX295 being the exceptions) have the ability to saturate the bandwidth afforded by PCIe x8.
If you're planning on SLI'ing two GTX 480 or 470 cards I suggest you start praying for a lottery win.
The EVGA board is good, and looks better if you believe you'll ever get your rebate. I would personally look at a degree of futureproofing by looking at either:
Asus P7P55D-E Pro ($200 + S/H)
Gigabyte P55A-UD4P ($200 + S/H)
Both offer native USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb support which could come in handy. Running your OS from a SATA 6Gb harddrive such as this or (especially) this is by far the biggest performance boost you can give a system.

After some issues where I replaced an ASUS mobo 4 times I will never buy an asus motherboard again. And since I don't plan on going with a SSD I think I'll go with the EVGA board. Another feature I like about the eVGA one is that it can support LGA 775 heatsinks. Since the i5 default heatsink sucks i'll use my core 2 duo one until I buy an aftermarkey when I get all this said and done.

princeton · Feb 14, 2010

OK wait!

GTX 480? Did they seriously decide to skip GTX 300 and go to GTX 400 in terms of gpu names?

dividebyzero · Feb 15, 2010

The 300 series is now exclusively for DX10/10.1 cards, with DX11 cards belonging to the 400 series to both differentiate between DirectX versions and architectures as well as putting some distance between the re-brands/low spec cards and the GPGPU (Fermi) cards.

princeton · Feb 15, 2010

dividebyzero said: ↑

The 300 series is now exclusively for DX10/10.1 cards, with DX11 cards belonging to the 400 series to both differentiate between DirectX versions and architectures as well as putting some distance between the re-brands/low spec cards and the GPGPU (Fermi) cards.

I wonder if in fermi they'll put some decent anti aliasing. Like ATI cards get a very small performance drop with x2 or x4 AA unlike nvidia.

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Motherboard SLI/Crossfire support

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