Motherboard for crossfire

[masscrazy]

Im looking for a crossfire socket 775 motherboard, one that has pcie 2 x16 v.2 and not 2 PCI-E x8 crossfire.

Anyone got any suggestions, cheapest possible one. Asus if possible.

[Nanek]

There's the Asus P5E3 PRO for about ~£100 at scan, which comes with everything you need.

Also the GIGABYTE GA-X48, slightly more expensive but also does the job.

[Ulti]

Just out of interest, why PCI-E 2.0 x16/x16 crossfire and not x8/x8 crossfire? The difference is almost neglible even with 5870s in crossfire, there's around a FPS drop of around less than 5% in most cases so I don't see why you won't go for a x8/x8 crossfire board.

[woody_294]

Just out of interest, why PCI-E 2.0 x16/x16 crossfire and not x8/x8 crossfire? The difference is almost neglible even with 5870s in crossfire, there's around a FPS drop of around less than 5% in most cases so I don't see why you won't go for a x8/x8 crossfire board.

+1 The difference between the 2 setups is as stated, around 5%.

[Pob255]

The difference was around 2% for two 5870 as far as I remember, the main time you'll start to get bigger drops is if you're using dual gpu cards.
5% drops occured at x4 vs x16

However yes as Nanek said, for full x16+x16 you want an x48 chipset motherboard, any x48 chipset one not just the two he listed.

[masscrazy]

OK if thats the case, my p5k-e runs at 1 x16 and the other x4. Shall i just stick with my current board? And they're PCI-E version1.0

[Ulti]

Well I've heard PCI-E 1.0 Crossfire at 16x/4x isn't so good, in terms of performance, P35 is quite a bit weaker than the P45 which is only a tiny bit weaker than the X38 and X48 chipset for CrossFire.

Scan have got the DFI LanParty DK P45-T2RS Plus for around £62, £61 on Today Only too which is a P45 chipset and therefore supports Crossfire at 8x/8x link with PCI-E 2.0 which in affect is the same as 16x/16x PCI-E 1.0a

[masscrazy]

Well I've heard PCI-E 1.0 Crossfire at 16x/4x isn't so good, in terms of performance, P35 is quite a bit weaker than the P45 which is only a tiny bit weaker than the X38 and X48 chipset for CrossFire.

Scan have got the DFI LanParty DK P45-T2RS Plus for around £62, £61 on Today Only too which is a P45 chipset and therefore supports Crossfire at 8x/8x link with PCI-E 2.0 which in affect is the same as 16x/16x PCI-E 1.0a

Perfect. Good catch aswell on the today only. Never heard of the company im assuming they're pretty good.

Although i dont mind paying the extra £1 if need be in a few days, cos i got a gigabyte board lined up which is full "true" x16 X2 V.2. So if that doesnt go thru ima get me one of these.

How is DFI Lan Party overclocking?

[Ulti]

I'm surprised you've never heard of DFI. They've always been one of the enthusiast companies to go with, along with Abit since the days. However nowadays Asus and MSI do both provide enthusiast boards along with Foxxconn even.

From what I've read, this board matches the expectations of DFI. However, I've got to say that compared to my previous Abit IP35 Pro it's slightly "harder" to overclock. It certainly matches it though and from what I've heard P45 can reach higher FSBs than P35s. I was constantly running 500 FSB (quad pumped to 2000FSB) on my Abit IP35 Pro XE and I can do the same with this DFI board on the same voltages it seems (except with memory which seems to require more voltage at first glance - I haven't tested it enough to check if I can lower it to what I set it at on my Abit board though). However, there are many more options on this DFI board and as I'm not the type to spend more time in the BIOS than in the OS I'm not too familiar with all the options. I'm about to flash to a higher BIOS to see how things go and see if I can lower the voltages.

It's a shame Abit has gone out of business to be honest as I never liked the colour scheme of Gigabyte boards. Asus boards cost a ton load and Foxxconn boards are more of a hit and miss really nowadays. MSI have been doing cost good lately and their latest boards look like the Abit boards with the black and blue colour scheme and without the fancy roller coaster heatpipes. DFI is usually quite expensive and whilst I was expecting socket 775 motherboards to drop in price I didn't expect it to drop this much.

Either way, I'm happy with this board, just annoyed that I didn't know that the P45 chipsets almost require the same amount of voltage as P35 chipset and then after a few system crashes due to not enough NB voltage my HDD got corrupted somehow I've pretty much spent the whole day getting everything sorted now and waiting for my USB stick to be flashed to a boot drive, not sure why it's taking too long.

[woody_294]

DFI = Win!

Not on AMD atm though I hear