New mobo?

[badogblue]

Hey everyone, this is my first post and would greatly appreciate any replies!

I am building a new pc mainly for gaming (crysis, far cry2 COD5 etc...)
I need some advice on what mobo to go for. I would like it to be SLI compatible as i am planning on going for 2x gtx285 which i believe would be better than 2x 4890.
My cpu will be an e8500 oc to 4ghz, so mobo must support socket 775 and be good for overclocking.

Ideally i would go for an intel chipset board over nvidia, but that would require an i7 cpu which is just out of my price range and would also result in a lower clock speed (i7 920 @ 2.66ghz) and right now for gaming clock speed is more important than number of cores.

So to sum up, what socket 775 SLI mobo should i go for! (Budget £160).

Thank you!

 

[badogblue]

Could someone please reply.

Thanks.

 

[Voxination]

Well, your limited to these 3

Asus P5N-D

Asus Striker II Formula

Asus Striker II Extreme



Of the 3 I'd go with the Striker II Formula, although I'm not an nForce chipset expert.

If you can search around, eVGA do a nice 750i *** motherboard.


Not sure how any of these clock though, but I can say to avoid the P5N-D as it's pretty useless at clocking (Quads at least)

 

[badogblue]

Thanks Voxination, i was thinking of the eVGA 750i and Asus Striker II Formula mobo myself, just don't know how well they will oc an e8500 from 3.16 to 4ghz.

 

[jbloggs]

Asus Striker II Formula...don't know how well they will oc an e8500 from 3.16 to 4ghz.

Have a look Here and Here

The Asus Striker II Formula will have no trouble clocking your E8500 to 4.0GHz and beyond...

 

[badogblue]

Does anyone know how well the eVGA 750i mobo overclocks as i can get it quite cheap?

 

[jbloggs]

Have a look Here ...do acquaint yourself with a person called "Google"...

 

[AMG]

only get them if you need too, the Nfoce chips are very very annoying (can be)

 

[DavyBoy]

I have heard that the 775 nForce chipsets are supposed to be garbage.. though I haven't had any experience with them personally...

Will you be purchasing a complete base unit or is this just going to be an upgrade to your existing rig??

I ask this, because i7 systems are a lot cheaper now than they were when they first got released...

 

[DavyBoy]

Here, I just specced 2 systems, one using the e8500, and another using an i7 920, there really isn't much difference in the prices tbh.. check it out for yourself...

LGA775, £1,060.25:

LGA1366, £1,112.26:

For £52.01 more you could have the i7 system with 6GB of RAM instead of the 775 rig with 4GB of RAM... I know which one I would go for...

 

[RJC]

Change the board to the Gigabyte UD3R as the Asus P6T SE does not support SLI only crossfire.

 

[Rab]

aint going socket 775 backwards thou, not much u can upgrade after this, but with i7 you are more future proof

 

[AMG]

AMD platform is nice as well, even on SLI never used one yet

and pocket the differences but yeah I7 all the way if money is no problem and you need it