Which B3 Stepping Board for new build

[nick_h]

Well I have everything now about from the Mother Board.

Any suggestions on which B3 board to go for ?

Should be SLI ready ( possibly 2 580's )

Budget of around £125

Cheers !

[kalniel]

Well I have everything now about from the Mother Board.

Any suggestions on which B3 board to go for ?

Should be SLI ready ( possibly 2 580's )

Budget of around £125

Cheers !

Any idea if a SLI'd 580 saturates x8 PCI-E v2 lanes? If so, you need to look for a board with a NF200 chip to provide an extra communications bridge between the two slots. But good luck getting one within budget if that's the case - you're looking at the likes of the P8P67 WS, or gigabyte UD7 or similar.

If you're spending that much on GPUs then you should probably get something other than a budget motherboard anyway.

[Skulltrail]

For that price you'll likely be limited to a x16/x8 mATX, such as http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...gb-s-raid-matx

[nick_h]

Any idea if a SLI'd 580 saturates x8 PCI-E v2 lanes? If so, you need to look for a board with a NF200 chip to provide an extra communications bridge between the two slots. But good luck getting one within budget if that's the case - you're looking at the likes of the P8P67 WS, or sabretooth, or gigabyte UD7 or similar.

If you're spending that much on GPUs then you should probably get something other than a budget motherboard anyway.

Sorry I dont really understand what you mean. Could you explain ? Only buying the 1 580 now but would like the option of adding another later if possible.

Probably could stretch to say £135. Who so expensive for 2 580's in SLI ?

Here my system so far with only the MB to get :

System


Case
Coolermaster Cosmos S


MB
Undecided


Processor and Memory
Intel Core i5 2500K "Unlocked" 3.3Ghz Quad Core, 6Mb Cache

Memory
8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600), Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 9-9-9-24, XMP, 1.50V

PSU
Corsair 850W HX Modular PSU - 80plus Silver Certified Efficiency

SSD
60GB Corsair Force F60, MLC-Flash, 2.5" Sandforce SSD, Read 285MB/s, Write 275MB/s, w/ bracket

Cooler
Corsair H70 CPU Liquid Cooler

Video
GTX 580

Blu Ray
LG BH10LS30 - 10x Blu-Ray Writer & DVDRW - Retail Box + Software


DVD Software

Cyberlink Power DVD 10 Ultra Mark II Software

Monitor

NVIDIA Geforce 3D Vision Bundle - Asus VG236H 23" LCD + Nvidia 3D Glasses

[kalniel]

Sorry I dont really understand what you mean. Could you explain ? Only buying the 1 580 now but would like the option of adding another later if possible.

Probably could stretch to say £135. Who so expensive for 2 580's in SLI ?

Two 580s cost around £800 in total. That's more than most people spend on the whole computer, yet GPUs become outdated in only a few years. A motherboard on the other hand often stays around much longer.

As for what I mean, I mean this: The core i7 2500k+P67 chipset restricts you to 16 lanes of graphics card connections. You can either have all 16 going to one graphics card, or two lots of 8 going to each of two. I don't know how much bandwidth two 580s take up when talking to each other and the CPU, but if it is greater than 8 lanes then you are restricting them, which would be a flying shame having spent so much on them. To get around any restriction, if it exists, you need to buy a motherboard with more than 8 lanes going to each card in an SLI set up. To effectively do that with the p67 requires the use of a NF200 chip, which you can find in the motherboards I mentioned (not the sabretooth, which I mistakenly added - should have been maximus IV extreme).

If you also want to consider future SSDs then you also need to be careful with the available PCI-E lanes, so as not to cause data transfers to be restricted by available bandwidth.

[JohnnyMnemonic]

There is barely any noticable difference between crossfire or SLI at x16, x16 and x8, x8. it was tested with some high end graphics cards (GTX580's i believe) and there was literally no difference in framerate when the games were going at maximum graphics.

(2nd hand info, wouldn't base a buying decision on it but if you want the source just stick the text in google)

[nick_h]

Excellent info. Thanks kalniel you put that very well. After MUCH deliberating I've just clicked the order button on one of these on Today Only :

1280MB EVGA GTX 570 SC, 40nm, 3900MHz GDDR5, GPU 797MHz, Shader 1594MHz, 480 Cores, 2x DL DVI/ mHDMI

Saved myself £100 quid and the performance still looks to be very good. Of course I will leave myself the option of dropping another in later ( months ) if needed.

Buying this new kit and bringing myself upto speed with whats on the market has been great fun. The last time I built a new system with a pretty large budget was a 300 mhz Pentium II system. Cost me over £2k lol !

[kalniel]

Excellent info. Thanks kalniel you put that very well. After MUCH deliberating I've just clicked the order button on one of these on Today Only :

1280MB EVGA GTX 570 SC, 40nm, 3900MHz GDDR5, GPU 797MHz, Shader 1594MHz, 480 Cores, 2x DL DVI/ mHDMI

Saved myself £100 quid and the performance still looks to be very good. Of course I will leave myself the option of dropping another in later ( months ) if needed.

Buying this new kit and bringing myself upto speed with whats on the market has been great fun. The last time I built a new system with a pretty large budget was a 300 mhz Pentium II system. Cost me over £2k lol !

Excellent choice - still an absolutely amazing graphics card and much better value for money.

For motherboards to match I would go for an Asus p8p67 Pro. I would normally recommend the equivalent Gigabyte board over Asus as IMHO the support and software are better, however Gigabyte have repositioned their products for the p67 chipset so at the moment it looks like you have to spend more to get the same features.

If you go for the base p8p67 I don't think you get SLI, which is a consideration of yours for the future. As mentioned by skulltrail, to keep within your original budget that would require going for a micro-ATX version of the motherboard, which could be fine if you don't have many peripheral cards, however I'd use some of the graphics card savings and get the full ATX board when it comes out.