Some advice please. New Build.

[BeLGaRaTh67]

I am thinking of building a new PC and have a few issues which I will explain here. The components I am thinking of are as follows ...

Intel i7 860
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4
Lite-on BD-Rom
1.5TB Samsung F2 Sata HD (Games/Movies etc)
500GB WD Sata HD (system drive)
4GB Corsair RAM
InWin Ironclad Gaming Chassis
850W PSU
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler
Palit GTX 460 1GB Sonic Platinum x2

I will be binning my existing PC and moving over the Win7 Pro to this machine (assuming that's allowed?)

There is one issue I have though, I have been told that the MoBo in question will only take one card due to it using SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 and that will be running at 8x instead of 16x. I have also been told I can disable this and use two cards but both cards will be running at 8x, thus 8x 8x.

Obviously this is halving the bandwidth so before putting through an order which is over £1,150 I want to make sure that I will be getting the full usage from my graphics cards, if not can someone suggest another MoBo in replacement of the Gigabyte one?

I did try and put URL's against all of the items I purchased but when I tried to post it said I wasn't allowed to include URL's due to excessive spam

Hopefully someone in this great community can offer some advice

[Terbinator]

Unless you get a board with Nvidia's NF200 chip, running two graphics cards will always revert too x8 mode for each - it will do this even without USB3/SATA 6 add ons. I can't think of a board which supports x16 in two lanes for the P55 CPU's that are on the nice side of £150.

Personally, you should go i7 920/30 if youre after multigraphics set-up as most of the X58 boards do support more than one x16 slots.

Also, what is the PSU you have chosen ?

[BeLGaRaTh67]

It was the corsair, can't remember the exact one now, as mentioned I did have everything all laid out with links to the items I was purchasing but it would not allow me

So I would be better off just running one card rather than SLI then I would get x16 or would that be x8 too, I am unsure as a friend of mine told me that he just set up a similar build (same board) and he only got x8 on his single card (a gtx 470)

Just had a quick look around scan and found the following chip and board ...

i7 920 (www).scan.co.uk/products/Intel-Core-i7-920-D0-SLBEJ-Bloomfield-45nm-266GHz-QPI-48GT-s-8MB-Cache-20x-Ratio-130W-Retail

GA-x58-UDR3-Rev2 (www).scan.co.uk/products/Gigabyte-GA-X58A-UD3R-Rev-2-Intel-X58-S1366-SLi-Xfire-PCI-E-2-DDR3-2200-USB3-and-SATA-6Gb-s


Would that board/chip combo be fine and would I get x16 on both boards?


Thanks for all the help it is much appreciated, it's just that spending over a grand, I want to make sure that I get everything right and won't be wasting bandwidth etc, hence the worry over x8 x8

Sorry had to mess around again with addingurls, that rule is really silly considering the url's are direct to scan's site

[danroyle]

i'd get a core i7 920 over the 860 its a weird price point and no better than the 920 or 930,

Also is a preoverclocked 460 worth the premium they all seem to overclock pretty well