Best GAMING board (s939)?
I've been under the impression for the past couple of months that, as I want 4 SATA ports on my shiny new S939 motherboard, that I should get the ASUS A8V Deluxe.
Having stumbled across an online review of the MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum motherboard something struck me (it was the wife - she hates me using my WiFi laptop in bed!).
According to the reviewer the actual speed difference between all the new S939 boards is not that great and some boards outperform others in certain areas. For instance, your tests showed that the MSI is the best board for gaming on and the PSP image editing test showed that it is slightly faster than the Asus in this area as well.
In terms of speed, the MSI board was the second fastest on the speed rating % scale, but was let down on the value side as it was £15 more expensive than the Asus (although this is now only about £8 if you compare them at Dabs), yet doesn't have things like WiFi and EIDE Raid.
This said, as far as I am aware, the nVidia RAID controller on the MSI is more versatile as it would allow all 4 SATA ports to link together via RAID 0 and as they are all running from the Southbridge, should be very fast indeed. (Oh yes - why wasn't the hardware firewall on the MSI board mentioned? Is it any good?)
My question is as follows:
A man spends 90% of his time gaming, 8% of his time performing image manipulation in PhotoShop and 2% of his time designing web-sites in Dreamweaver. Additionally, he doesn't go to LAN parties and his broadband router is behind his PC. He doesn't encode MPEG movies and doesn't do much CD ripping (he is a gooood boy, yes he is!)
Which board would be the best for him?
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