Help with choosing motherboard please!

Artheas

Artheas

Artheas

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Joined
15 Mar 2006
Posts
2,097
I'm building a new machine, which will comprise of...

Opteron 170
2Gb Crucial Ballistix DDR4000
XFX 7900GT Extreme
Enermax Noisetaker 600W
Western Digital WD2500KS Caviar SE16 x 2
Akasa Eclipse-62
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
+ other misc stuff


Firstly, i'd like to ask, the 'new' 32x mobos, where you can run SLI with both graphics PCIe slots running at x16 rather than x8 each with the 'regular' boards, would it give a significant performance boost with the 7900GT? I assume it depends on the performance of the graphics card ie if it would need that extra bandwidth. So do you reckon dual 7900GT would need it to 'fulfill it's SLI potential' so to speak.

I'm planning to play plenty of Oblivion, and after that start with some overclocking (new to it). So i wont be going crazy with it, but i plan to get the Opteron to about 2.6GHz, but i wont be touching the graphics card.

The boards i'm considering are:
Abit AN8 SLi NF4
Asus A8N-SLI SE
Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe (maybe, SE seems to be a better value for money version)

Abit AN8 32X
Asus A8N32-SLi Deluxe

Any opinions/help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks :)
 
Welcome to the forums! :)

scrub your list and look at the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, powerful, stable, proven.

1925-1.jpg
 
It's also got 8 SATA ports just about everything else you might want and decent, reasonably accessible overclocking capabilities. Most importantly, it's very good value ;)
 
Do you all work for ASUS? :p

It seems to be very highly recommended, and is about £20 higher than the a8n-sli that i originally intended to get.

I've read that the a8n has problems during booting with several types of hard disk, has anyone had these problems? This is a big worry for me, because i hate problems that are inexplicable/insolvable.
Also, the an8 has a UGuru overclocking 'thing' which many reviews rave about, which was also one of the reasons i originally went for the an8.

Could anyone with the Premium confirm for me if it's possible to run SATA and PATA HDDs at the same time? I've heard that many mobos can't, and if i got this confirmation, i'm pretty sure i'll get the Premium.
 
Artheas said:
Do you all work for ASUS? :p

It seems to be very highly recommended, and is about £20 higher than the a8n-sli that i originally intended to get.

I've read that the a8n has problems during booting with several types of hard disk, has anyone had these problems? This is a big worry for me, because i hate problems that are inexplicable/insolvable.
Also, the an8 has a UGuru overclocking 'thing' which many reviews rave about, which was also one of the reasons i originally went for the an8.

Could anyone with the Premium confirm for me if it's possible to run SATA and PATA HDDs at the same time? I've heard that many mobos can't, and if i got this confirmation, i'm pretty sure i'll get the Premium.
Click to expand...

I am recomending the Premium from my own good experiences using one and having read a lot of other peoples comments. My own expertise is limited and I found this mobo reasonably easy to set-up and overclock. I have used several ASUS, Asrock, Gigabyte, MSI and various other mobo's and they are all good but I always seem to find ASUS just that bit easier somehow.

I currently run 2xWD 250Gig se16 SATA HDD's and have also run these plus 2 IDE drives and 2xDVD R/W at the same time without issue.

I like the passive cooling setup and don't personally bother with the O/Cing software as I find it better to do it properly in the BIOS.

However, you are doing the right thing getting as many 'informed' oppinions as possible before deciding ;)
 
Oops, nearly forgot. Don't use any of the nvidia chip's NWK management software unless somebody else chips in :rolleyes: I found it useless :mad: Everything I downloaded was corrupted and that's when it worked at all :confused:
 
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