Is it better to go for 2 Xeon x5650's or 1 x5690 for now ?

[watercooled]

They would fit, one in the x16 slot and one in the bottom x4 electrical slot but I don't think SLI/Crossfire can be enabled in this configuration. I can almost guarantee you won't get 2 of those cards in the x16 slots without some sort of modification. Using a PCIe extender would be an option but things start to get messy that way.

[sithlord3k]

Oh ok. If you have the time, could you please give me a recommendation about a suitable board that would. I would like to overclock the cpu (a bit anyway). Also I know that one or two of the Gigabytes dont come with Sata III 6Gb/s.

Thank you.

[watercooled]

I can't find anything for ~£150 that could give enough room between the cards but this board for about £200 gives you room for triple slot cards. But I don't think it's money well spent really, just to get that second slot needlessly running at x16. Have a look at this article: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...8-x4,2696.html

[sithlord3k]

Oh no, I dont mind having the 2nd slot running at x8. I did a bit of reading and saw that the results running 2 gtxs (1x 16 & 1x8) are negligable. Was there a board around £150 that would let me run the 2nd gpu at x8 instead of x16, that you'd recommend ?

[watercooled]

Ah gotcha.

I'm a bit behind on X58 boards but these two look good:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1giga...and-sata-6gb-s
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-sata-raid-atx

See if there are any features on one board over the other you prefer. I think both meet your needs though.

[sithlord3k]

So I'm thinking of going with the Asus board, but before I'm 100% certain I have a few questions:

1. If I go with the Asus, I'm only getting 6 internal Sata sockets, and I need more than that. Because I'm going to be running 2 GTX 580s and they are dual slot, will I have space to plug in a Sata controller card and get 2 extra Sata sockets that way ?

2. I want to get 2x 3TB HDDs, but I've been reading about the 2.19TB (IIRC) limit. Is this something that will cause me a lot of grief to sort out (i.e. to get them recognised) ? BTW I wont be installing the OS on this (or booting from it obviously).

3. If I go with the Gigabyte, I get 2 extra Sata sockets, but apparently running on the marvell/ gigabyte custom controller (IIRC) (127/126 read/write) and not the Intel ICH10R. From what I read in a few benchmark reviews, these marvell ones at almost half the speed of the Intel ones. How much would this affect me in real life day to day situations ? If it helps, I will be connecting my Blu ray drive (which I will be using to watch blu rays) to one of the Marvell sockets, and the other Marvell socket will be used for my temporary downloads disk (solely dedicated to temporarily storing downloaded files, for later use).

4. If I can fit a sata controller into the Asus, which option is better, the sata controller + the Asus, or the Gigabyte with the 2 slow sata sockets ?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

SLI will be of little use for non-gaming applications AFAIK.

[sithlord3k]

SLI will be of little use for non-gaming applications AFAIK.

Yeah, I know, but in terms of rendering in some apps, the CUDA cores are detected, so can can make use of both cards.