Motherboard replacement - any ideas?

[sammorris]

Somewhat at a loss as to which board to get for my gaming PC. The current Maximus II Formula has some bizarre stability problems, and being the 4th of four Asus boards I've owned to go down the pan, I'm not really interested in replacing it with another.
Gigabyte too are also out, as the majority of their boards don't work with two graphics cards installed. Why it's only gigabytes that are like this I've got no idea. (Tested with both X38-DS4 and X48-DS5)
DFI I think are out, as I have an engineering sample graphics card which DFI boards reject, as my friend found out.

Would really have liked to go X48 instead of P45, but there's very little choice out there at the moment. I was considering a Biostar TPower I45, but read there were some hardware tolerance issues with those as well. Any better ideas?

Thanks in advance

[Hawker1986]

If your running dual 4870X2 then you cant use a P45 board as it runs 8x 8x with two GPUs and that will bottleneck your bandwidth to the graphics cards, so you need a X48 mobo.

Hawker

[sammorris]

I can and do use a P45 board. The performance impact of the 8/8x split isn't actually that bad since it's PCIe 2.0. I would prefer an X48 board but don't seem to have any reliable options.

[Hawker1986]

Ah I was under the impression that was a problem, but fair enough, in which case I would say get something gigabyte, ive had no problems running dual cards on my EP45-DS3R, nothing wrong with them at all for about the last year.

Hawker

[sammorris]

I decided to get an X48-DS4 from ebuyer because it was relatively cheap (certainly compared to any other brands), and it has better cooling than the DS5, which I found was part of the problem - I could adjust the PCI express issue I had by how fast the case fan was, and I now run my PC in a better ventilated case, so we'll see). Free MP3 player apparently, not sure whether i'll use that but hey, better than nothing.