Which P55 mobo?

[Showboat]

I am a bit confused and hope some of the experts can provide some advice.

I will be ordering a pc some time in the next month for the release of windows 7.

I will mostly use it for gaming, and have decided on an i5 processor.

For the mobo i am confused as i had wanted an nvidia card and to SLI it as it's upgrade in a year or two. Also as most RAM seems to run at 1600Mhz i wanted a mobo that supported that as well, to get it running as fast as possible.

None of the Gigabyte mobos support 1600 mem speeds (Memory: 4x DDR3 DIMM 2200 / 1333 / 1066 / 800 MHz (Max. 16GB) / Dual Channel / Intel Extreme Memory Profile (XMP))

The asus one @ £114 does not support SLI, but offers 1600 mem support

The £99 MSI says it supports SLI, but only contains one PCI-E.... (Mistake on webby?)
The £131 MSI does SLI and 1600 mem speeds.


So it's going to cost £17 for the privilage of having an SLI upgrade option.
Tempted to stick the fingers up at nvidia and just go for a 4890.


So my question!

Does my reasoning make sense in terms of a future upgrade (SLI / xfire) and also about the 1600mem speeds, or is the memory diff so negligible it won't be noticed, and should i just go for the cheapest Gigabyte at £87 and xfire it when i need to upgrade?

Thanks in advance to anyone who took the time to read and understand my ramblings

 

[Admiral Huddy]

Well the i5 is actually classed as a budget/mid range CPU although the price of the motherboards lets it down slighty. So go for the cheapest 1156 you can get your hands on. As for memory, the frequencies make little in terms of performance and the high frequency modules only come into their own when the CPU bus is increased. So if you ar thinking of overclocking it may be wise to have some headroom.

As for the graphics card, I would wait and see what happens withthe 5* series this week. A single 5850/70 may be all you need. Even if you can't afford the new cards, it's release will push down the cost of the outgoing cards. Something to think about.

 

[nathanc]

Adding to the previous post, the 1156 boards are not really designed for SLI/XFire as there isn't enough bandwidth in the on chip PCIe controller (that's also what reduces overclocking ability).

So if you are serious about running multiple cards, you should go for the more expensive 1366 chipset - however, multi card setups have their own issues...

Wait and see how a single card 5870 performs!

Your money may be better spent on an Core i7 860 with it's hyper-threading and increased turbo modes.

 

[Showboat]

Just remembered that the new cards are out tomorrow, doubt i would need one to run anything that a 4890 or 275 could not handle, but may push price down a bit as you have said.

Thanks

 

[Nocky24]

yeh im considering going 1156 just now. If these new single gpus are all they're cracked upto be i might just do it and forget the whole xfire/sli idea which i was going to do with an x58/i7 setup. If they're good enough one gpu a time will do for me.