Really easy! DS3 / DS4... Which??

[Fizzer]

OK I need advice on this please folks!!

My head hurts reading all the diffrent DS3 / DS4 posts and I am still not decided......

Getting:

• Intel Core 2 DUO E4300 "LGA775 Allendale" 1.86GHz (1066FSB)

• GeIL 2GB PC6400C4 Ultra Low Latency DDR2

• Zalman CNPS9500-AT Aero Flower (Socket 775) CPU Cooler

Now Which MoBo ?????

Gigabyte 965P DS3 or DS4 <<Edited Told ya my head was spinning..

Or maybe you could suggest something else!!!

I will be doing an OC on it just not too heavy a good rock solid stable one for the GF's son.
He's on a £600 upgrade budget of his old AMD system, so will be needing PSU and Graphic card also but I have already decided on them

• HIS ATI Radeon X1950 Pro ICEQ 3 TURBO SILENT Heatpipe 512MB

• Corsair HX 520W ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU

 

[beast]

You mean DS3 or DS4? I think the DS4 is just the DS3 but with two PCI-E slots for crossfire/sli. If you are on a budget then the DS3 makes sense, especially with it being £80 this week.

 

[Fizzer]

Thanks for that... All the reading I have done about overclocking etc I missed the obvious diffreance between the 2 What a Muppet I am

He may want the SLI option so Thank you..

 

[WJA96]

Thanks for that... All the reading I have done about overclocking etc I missed the obvious difference between the 2 What a Muppet I am

He may want the Crossfire option so Thank you..

Differences are;

DS4 can run Crossfire 1.0 (X1950 Pro uses Crossfire 2 so beware of that)
DS4 has Firewire
DS4 has significantly better chipset cooling
DS4 has ICH8R Raid array support, DS3 has no RAID support.

At £80 on this week only the DS3 is a real bargain. If you want SLi rather than Crossfire then the ASUS P5N-E SLi is £88 and has all the features of the DS4 but uses the NVidia 650i chipset rather than the P965. It clocks very, very well too (as well as the DS3 or DS4).

 

[Buffalo2102]

Differences are;

DS4 can run Crossfire 1.0 (X1950 Pro uses Crossfire 2 so beware of that)
DS4 has Firewire
DS4 has significantly better chipset cooling
DS4 has ICH8R Raid array support, DS3 has no RAID support.

At £80 on this week only the DS3 is a real bargain. If you want SLi rather than Crossfire then the ASUS P5N-E SLi is £88 and has all the features of the DS4 but uses the NVidia 650i chipset rather than the P965. It clocks very, very well too (as well as the DS3 or DS4).

DS3 DOES have RAID support but not via the Intel controller. It has a separate Gigabyte SATA2/PATA controller that supports RAID0, 1 and jbod.

 

[-CsA-TAZ]

You mean DS3 or DS4? I think the DS4 is just the DS3 but with two PCI-E slots for crossfire/sli. If you are on a budget then the DS3 makes sense, especially with it being £80 this week.

The DS4 is not SLI or CROSSFIRE Mobo, there is only one X16 PCI-E slot the other is X4 so even with the modded drivers this would be a waste of a second card!

 

[WJA96]

The DS4 is not SLI or CROSSFIRE Mobo, there is only one X16 PCI-E slot the other is X4 so even with the modded drivers this would be a waste of a second card!

You are absolutley correct about the second slot only running at 4x under Crossfire. It is adequate bandwidth for a full Crossfire 1.0 system. You require a Crossfire master card and the external cable link. As far as I am aware no Crossfire system runs 2 x 16x - even the new RD600 systems run 2 x 8x. The DS4 does fully support Crossfire 1.0, but not Crossfire 2.0 or 3.0 which use the internal SLI-alike connectors.

Because of the way Crossfire works, it is perfectly possible to run full-speed Crossfire with a 16x slot and 4x slot. There are lots of tutorials on the 'net about how Crossfire works if you are interested.

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/News/Motherboard/News_List.aspx?NewsID=1295

I don't know about SLi on Intel chipset motherboards, but I think it would be much more difficult to get a system running on this type of motherboard than on the native NVidia NForce4 or NForce6 chipset boards.

 

[WJA96]

DS3 DOES have RAID support but not via the Intel controller. It has a separate Gigabyte SATA2/PATA controller that supports RAID0, 1 and jbod.

Indeed. Thanks for correcting my error.

 

[Goody_GTI]

Go for the DS3 on this week only real bargain - I am

And you may possibly should consider changing the cooler to the tuniq tower as it is supposedly much better, but thats down to opinion and is rather large