Thanks for the replies.
Yes, MSI are for me, hard to fault. Having had both an NF2 and an NF3 Board, they were both good clockers, and on par with Abit and DFI ( most of the way until you get silly ) I have been happy. DFI are 50-50 for me at this time, as I have 2 LP250GBUT Mobos, and one is dead, the other is a beauty. Abit comes into play more over because I went through a stage of just loving them for their stability... KR7 - KT7Ar ( Still runs a TB14 perfectly ) - KD7 ( Running a Barton 3200 just peachy still ) and both an NF7 ( Dead due to a suicide run ) and an NF7S ( Running an XP25 @ 2.7 perfectly well ), so Abit is s serious option for me there.
Soem things are also startign to creep into my plans here, and thats ECS, but this is more for the price really! - I have an NForce3+A thats an ECS and its not too hot for the clocking from the small tests I have done, but it has taken a Sempron 3100 to 245FSB fairly easily, so that might just be a stop-over gap while I give up and get somethign serious, I just dont know?
To be honest, *** reason behind me wanting this, is purely because I got a P4 3.6 a few weeks back, and in *** quest to get it faster than my AMD systems, I ended up splashing money on it with a Saphire x800 PCI-E card, and 4GB RAM and I realised that it was so poor against the AMDs that I have now got rid of it, but now I am left with a PCIE Card that I want to use, however, all the PCI Mobos dont seem to cater for those of us who want to use a few PCI Cards.
Another issue I have, is that the few Mobos I have seen, have the PCIE slots too bloody close to the top PCI slot, so if I was to populate them, then the GFX card would surely overheat?
If I was to accept a loss, and get an SLI Mobo, can I use the top slot and leave the bottom one out? - This would give me the gap for sure?? - There are planty of boards to chose fromthat have 3 PCI slots, and this would do.
The thing is, that I have a number of Drives, that need to go in, and I currently use the 4 IDE ports on the Mobo for my DVDRW Drives, I use 2 SATA Ports for my C: and D: ( The other 2 are not locked, so they are out - this is the case for all my NForce boards that have 4 SATA Ports actually ) and I use another IDE Card for my E: and F: Drives.
I also have my TV Card, XFI, and The FireWire and USB Cards, and I do have a FireWire & USB Card in one that I could use, and so I could get away with a 3-PCI slot board I suppose?
I dont know to be honest.
Why dont I just accept my loss, keep the Saphire, get a cheap-o PCI Board that I dont care about clocking with, and throw the Clawhammer 37 into that ( Its already fast enough really ) and just get a good AGP Card for this Machine?
No, stuff it, I got the card now, so I got to make the move or I never will.
Ok, what about this Board ?
Sapphire PURE Advantage CrossFire Radeon Xpress 200P CrossFire (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-003-SP)
That will mean that I will be able to just get another card ( Master xfire one apparently )
What are these saphire boards like for clocking? Do they lock the bits down? - I was going to say PCI and AGP but obviously they dont have AGP, but you know what I mean?
