775 Xfire mobo recommend

niggyg · 26 Nov 2009 at 09:14

I'd like a 775 mobo that has Xfire. Any recommendations?

I've been looking at the ASUS P5N-E SLI second hand. Does this mobo not support xfire? As you may have figured I'm not really clued up on SLI/xFire.

BigBruiserAl · 26 Nov 2009 at 10:12

if your looking at xfire boards the x48 chipset seemed to be your best bet

niggyg · 26 Nov 2009 at 10:14

BigBruiserAl said:
if your looking at xfire boards the x48 chipset seemed to be your best bet

Thanks. Is that the only option? They seem quite expensive

They are also DDR3 and I've already bought my DDR2 for the build.

cmndr_andi · 26 Nov 2009 at 10:26

niggyg said:
I'd like a 775 mobo that has Xfire. Any recommendations?

I've been looking at the ASUS P5N-E SLI second hand. Does this mobo not support xfire? As you may have figured I'm not really clued up on SLI/xFire.

The ASUS P5N-E SLI is an nvidia chipset board (650i) and thus only supports SLI not crossfire. Also, this boards is not the best, it doesn't play well with quad core CPUs at all.

As BigBruiserAl said, the best chipset for crossfire using a s775 CPU is the X48. You can pick up one of these boards for £100 from OCUK, which considering how powerful it is - isn't a bad deal. Especially when you consider how much 2 decent graphics cards to run in crossfire will cost you.

You may also want to look towards P45 boards. They are a bit cheaper and overclock a bit better than X48 boards. However, they only support x8x8 crossfire (compared to x16x16 on X48) so you may lose a bit of performance in crossfire compared to an X48.

niggyg · 26 Nov 2009 at 10:36

I'd be running 5770's so I think 2 8x lanes wouldn't be holding them back. Thanks again for the info.

I wasn't aware of the different chipsets supporting either-or for SLI/Xfire.

pastymuncher · 26 Nov 2009 at 15:41

niggyg said:
Thanks. Is that the only option? They seem quite expensive

They are also DDR3 and I've already bought my DDR2 for the build.

It's only a few X48 boards that are DDR3. The vast majority are DDR2.

Geckovich · 26 Nov 2009 at 15:54

Also look for older x38 boards. As far as I'm aware the x38 is identical to the x48, only 90nm and not 65nm manufacturing process.

I'm currently running an x38 board that has had the bios flashed to that of an x48 (My Maximus formula thinks it's a Rampage formula).