FFS So Much Choice Nowadays

Twedd17 · 27 May 2008 at 17:46

Hi Folks

I've already posted a thread on asking for help in building a new PC. I haven't bought a PC now for 5 years and now the time has come to upgrade.

Please forgive my ignorance but what exactly are the pros and cons of having the following chipsets

P45 (I suppose too early to tell)
P35
X48
X38
nForce 7

I gather that you can only use nVidia cards with nForce boards, and the rest support ATI cards.

So over to you folks. I'm prepared to pay around £120 - £150 for it so as you'll know the choice here is massive. So what would you opt for?

Cheers

Theguy · 27 May 2008 at 17:57

If you got a nforce based chipset, you can still use ATI (AMD) based graphics cards. just you wouldnt be able to crossfire them ( as in 2 or more cards in the same comp). but single card use would be fine.

Sasso · 27 May 2008 at 18:05

get the skulltrail and u can do either

x-fire or sli

BUFF · 28 May 2008 at 00:13

Twedd17 said:
So over to you folks. I'm prepared to pay around £120 - £150 for it so as you'll know the choice here is massive. So what would you opt for?

you haven't actually said what you want it for (encoding, gaming etc.) or what features (RAID, firewire, Crossfire/SLI etc.) you need so nothing really to help people narrow down the choice.

Twedd17 · 29 May 2008 at 13:31

Sorry folks basically all I want to know is which is the best method to go for, I don't know whether I want to use crossfire or SLI in the future, but i'm not bothered about it in the near future.

So which route given the choice would you opt to go down?

Sorry if I'm being a bit vague here!!!

Cheers

BUFF · 29 May 2008 at 13:41

yes, you are being vague.

if all that you need is a basic mobo with a PCI-E gfx slot & say 4 SATA ports then ~£50 is probably enough.
If you need RAID, possibly Crossfire or SLI & you want to overclock a quad core within an inch of it's life then it's more likely to cost you the £120-150 that you mentioned.

X48 is essentially a tweaked/optimised X38 & X38 is basically a P35 but with an extra x16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes available for Crossfire compared to P35's PCI-E 1.x.
P45 is essentially looking to be a half-way house between P35 & X48.