Best bang for the buck mobo w/SLI support?

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Feileung

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 15, 2005
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I'm about to pull the trigger on an Intel E8400, GTX26, 4GB RAM and new HD. I plan on overclocking a bit but I'm running an an air cooler (Scythe Ninja). I'm not looking to compete in benchmark battles. I mostly game on this machine.

Can anyone recommend a good motherboard given my needs? I'd like the option of SLI in the future although I'm not sure I'll ever actually do it.

Thanks.
 
You might have heard, that most Intel Nforce motherboards are quite unstable. I had one and I thought it was horrible.

But nevertheless, I heard some good stuff about EVGA's 750i board.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188026

I've never used it before, so I can't really say if the product is good or not. But I say stay away from the 780i series. Unless if you want to go to Core i7, thats a different story.
 
750i FTW from evga is a very good option you will get 2 full 16x lane vs standard 750i
 
PAo_ReVoLT said:
750i FTW from evga is a very good option you will get 2 full 16x lane vs standard 750i
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It's the only LGA775 SLI capable board I can recommend in good conscience. I've been through hell with 680is and 780is. The 750i FTW is /supposedly/ much more reliable and less troublesome.
 
I had the EVGA 750i SLI and absolutely hated it, or more accurately I hated nVidia for the way they dealt with the chipset support issues. Don't get me wrong, the EVGA 750i SLI FTW is an overclocking monster but it had certain quirks while overclocking that were due to a defect in the chipset. The 780i boards suffer from the same defect. This defect caused video corruption and system crashes that oddly enough presented themselves while the end user would watch streaming video of certain formats. This included DiVX, Quicktime, H.264, and even Youtube (FLV). Sounds odd right? Almost unbelievable, right? Do a google search on "750i video corruption" and you'll see what I mean.

Do take note that this is NOT the fault of EVGA, it's the fault of nvidia and a defect in the 750i/780i chipset.

Nvidia "fixed" the defect eventually through a series of BIOS patches which trickled down to the various board partners (EVGA included). This "fix" was to add artificial latency to the CPU / Memory subsystem on the board, thereby somewhat crippling performance when compared to earlier BIOS versions. Nvidia has never admitted to the defect in the chipset and has chosen to silently implement these BIOS fixes with strict instructions to the board partners NOT to admit that there is any problem.

For the most part the video corruption issues have been solved (albeit at the cost of memory performance), although even with the latest BIOS patches you do still see it rear it's ugly head now and again.

If you absolutely MUST have a LGA775 board with SLI support then I'd recommend the EVGA 750i SLI FTW since it's packed with features and is an overclocking monster. You also have the benefit over other 750i based boards in that the two PCIE slots actually run in x16 mode in SLI, whereas on other 750i boards they switch to x8 mode.





Don't need SLI? Well that opens you up to a whole slew of choices depending on how much you want to spend.

Two of my favorite 'bang for your buck' LGA775 boards are the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P and the Asus P5Q Pro (or the plain P5Q). Both are stellar boards for the price, I love the Gigabyte board in particular... never have I seen a $130 ($110 after rebate) board that packs so many features in.

I'm actually working on a video review of the board, search Youtube for 'Gigabyte Review' and you'll probably find my introductory video on the board.
 
I've had a number of issues with 680i and 780i based boards, but never video corruption, so the issue described above apparently does not affect all boards. That said, I'd never defend the stability or reliability of /any/ of Nvidia's current Intel chipsets. If you do not /need/ SLI support, they should be avoided. Hell, spending the extra $500 is almost worth it to go with a Core i7 920 and X58 based board, just to get SLI without dealing with an Nvidia chipset.

If you decide against SLI avoid the "vanilla" (standard) P5Q. The P5Q Pro is fine (though I am generally /not/ an ASUS fan, as their customer support is arguably the worst in the industry) but the P5Q standard has horrible ATX power connector location (at the center of the board) which kills airflow in pretty much all cases.
 
I think I might go w/the Gigabit since I probably won't end up doing SLI. Come to think of it though, should I even bother upgrading the motherboard from my Tforce 965p?
 
Feileung said:
I think I might go w/the Gigabit since I probably won't end up doing SLI. Come to think of it though, should I even bother upgrading the motherboard from my Tforce 965p?
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Depends on if you're going to be overclocking or not. The 965p probably will support the E8400 with the latest BIOS, but if it does overclocking performance may not be the best considering it's an older chipset.
 
Blue Falcon said:
The 965p probably will support the E8400 with the latest BIOS
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That particular mobo can't support the E8400 as far as I can tell. The latest BIOs update is from September 17, 2007. The E8400 wasn't released until January. In addition, the P965 never had official support for 45nm CPUs though a handful of manufacturers did release BIOs updates for a few P965 mobos to support the 45nm CPUs.
 
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