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- Joined
- 9 Jun 2008
- Posts
- 349
Its time to say goodbye to my Asus A8N-Sli....
My CPU/ram is simply bottlenecking my performance too much.
I have £430 and am after an upgrade of motherboard/CPU/memory, the computer is mainly used for gaming. There will be an 8800GTX going in there, an x-fi fatality pro (PCI) and a wintv card going in there so I need at least 2 PCI slots. Its powered by an Antec NeoPower 650W PSU.
Its worth noting that after a long hard think I decided I am not going to SLi in the future which leaves intel chipsets open as they appear from reviews to be better than the nforce chipsets atm. I am going to overclock, but not to extreme levels, I am simply looking for a mobo thats stable and a good performer. I've read good and bad things about all the motherboards...ASUS looks like it has ram compatibility issues with OCZ, DFIs later boards underperform compared to the other vendors (appart from OCing of course), and Gigabyte/MSI are foreign to me.
A suggested price for the motherboard is around £180, I just cannot decide. Any help is much appreciated.
Other questions to riddle my mind though....RAM...first theres compatibility issues which is obviously a motherboard thing. Then its 2GB or 4GB, I am using 32-bit XP and dont plan on getting 64-bit Vista for a few months yet. So for now I've been looking at the OCZ 1150Mhz DDR2 2GB kits, however for £20 extra I can buy 4GB with the same speeds/timings. I read that XP will only recognize about 3.5, which I wasnt too bothered about because 4GB is there for future proofing. However I read theres problems with using this much on XP past this insignificant one that will cause it to crash (although this isnt confirmed). From further researching Vista's gaming is much improved with 4GB of RAM, yet I hate having 4 X 1GB sticks in because it ruins overclocking potential. What would you recommend? 2 X 1GB, or 2 X 2GB?
Any help is much appreciated, when I got my last mobo/cpu/mem pack the answers were clear as daylight on what was the best, but theres simply too much choice atm lol.
My CPU/ram is simply bottlenecking my performance too much.I have £430 and am after an upgrade of motherboard/CPU/memory, the computer is mainly used for gaming. There will be an 8800GTX going in there, an x-fi fatality pro (PCI) and a wintv card going in there so I need at least 2 PCI slots. Its powered by an Antec NeoPower 650W PSU.
Its worth noting that after a long hard think I decided I am not going to SLi in the future which leaves intel chipsets open as they appear from reviews to be better than the nforce chipsets atm. I am going to overclock, but not to extreme levels, I am simply looking for a mobo thats stable and a good performer. I've read good and bad things about all the motherboards...ASUS looks like it has ram compatibility issues with OCZ, DFIs later boards underperform compared to the other vendors (appart from OCing of course), and Gigabyte/MSI are foreign to me.
A suggested price for the motherboard is around £180, I just cannot decide. Any help is much appreciated.
Other questions to riddle my mind though....RAM...first theres compatibility issues which is obviously a motherboard thing. Then its 2GB or 4GB, I am using 32-bit XP and dont plan on getting 64-bit Vista for a few months yet. So for now I've been looking at the OCZ 1150Mhz DDR2 2GB kits, however for £20 extra I can buy 4GB with the same speeds/timings. I read that XP will only recognize about 3.5, which I wasnt too bothered about because 4GB is there for future proofing. However I read theres problems with using this much on XP past this insignificant one that will cause it to crash (although this isnt confirmed). From further researching Vista's gaming is much improved with 4GB of RAM, yet I hate having 4 X 1GB sticks in because it ruins overclocking potential. What would you recommend? 2 X 1GB, or 2 X 2GB?
Any help is much appreciated, when I got my last mobo/cpu/mem pack the answers were clear as daylight on what was the best, but theres simply too much choice atm lol.
