Okay, this a shameless, newbie-ish plea for help. 
It may, in fact, be the first of several, with similar pleas appearing in other sub-fora, but let us consider the motherboard question for now.
I'm going to be putting a new system together in a month or two, and, if everything pans out the way I'm hoping, it will be based on a pair of R600 video cards in Crossfire mode. That might, of course, change, either because ATI just gives up and doesn't release R600 at all (and let's be honest, the cancellation of the March 11th Editors' Day is not a good sign) or because, when it does eventually crawl out the door, it may turn out to be inferior to the as-yet-also-unreleased 8900GTX. However, let us assume for the moment that R600 does ship in April, and that it does perform at least on a par with Nvidia's G80 refresh; the question then is, what motherboard would be appropriate?
For a CPU I'm currently thinking about a Core 2 Duo E6600, hopefully clocked up to about 3GHz, perhaps using a Tuniq Tower 120 as a cooler. I might still have a sudden attack of profligacy and buy a Core 2 Quad chip, but that's a lot of money to pay just to get better performance when playing Alan Wake. (Sadly I don't think I can wait long enough to see how AMD's Barcelona works out - if I had to wait that long I'd give up and go with 8900GTX SLI instead!).
So: are there actually any C2D motherboards that are suitable for a high-end Crossfire system? I don't fancy the idea of trying to hack an Nvidia 680 board to run Crossfire. The Intel P965 chipset overclocks very nicely, but (if I understand correctly) it's not happy with Crossfire. The ATI RD600 looked very promising right up to the point when it actually launched, but it's turned out to be a serious damp squib, not least because of the miserable clock-for-clock performance. That pretty much leaves me with the rapidly ageing Intel 975X chipset and (perhaps) an Intel Bad Axe 2 board - but that has serious issues with overclocking (compared to its rivals).
Is there any good option out there, or should I just give up?
It may, in fact, be the first of several, with similar pleas appearing in other sub-fora, but let us consider the motherboard question for now.I'm going to be putting a new system together in a month or two, and, if everything pans out the way I'm hoping, it will be based on a pair of R600 video cards in Crossfire mode. That might, of course, change, either because ATI just gives up and doesn't release R600 at all (and let's be honest, the cancellation of the March 11th Editors' Day is not a good sign) or because, when it does eventually crawl out the door, it may turn out to be inferior to the as-yet-also-unreleased 8900GTX. However, let us assume for the moment that R600 does ship in April, and that it does perform at least on a par with Nvidia's G80 refresh; the question then is, what motherboard would be appropriate?
For a CPU I'm currently thinking about a Core 2 Duo E6600, hopefully clocked up to about 3GHz, perhaps using a Tuniq Tower 120 as a cooler. I might still have a sudden attack of profligacy and buy a Core 2 Quad chip, but that's a lot of money to pay just to get better performance when playing Alan Wake.
(Sadly I don't think I can wait long enough to see how AMD's Barcelona works out - if I had to wait that long I'd give up and go with 8900GTX SLI instead!).So: are there actually any C2D motherboards that are suitable for a high-end Crossfire system? I don't fancy the idea of trying to hack an Nvidia 680 board to run Crossfire. The Intel P965 chipset overclocks very nicely, but (if I understand correctly) it's not happy with Crossfire. The ATI RD600 looked very promising right up to the point when it actually launched, but it's turned out to be a serious damp squib, not least because of the miserable clock-for-clock performance. That pretty much leaves me with the rapidly ageing Intel 975X chipset and (perhaps) an Intel Bad Axe 2 board - but that has serious issues with overclocking (compared to its rivals).
Is there any good option out there, or should I just give up?
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