Hi all,
I think I've sold the wife on an I7 920 upgrade for my birthday and the motherboard choices are making my head spin a bit. I need an X58 board that meets the following criteria:
- Can take all my GPUs. The GTX 260s are SLI'd and need full x16 slots. I need the 8800GT for my third monitor. I also am doing distributed computing with CUDA right now, so being able to have that third card is a nice bonus.
It's probably not critical for the third slot to have 16 lanes active, but it would be nice for it not be too gimped as I run an app that is PCI-E bandwidth limited on my current setup (Softth). I wouldn't mind the option of doing Tri-SLI later down the road if Nvidia improves their multi-mon support, as it seems to actually scale fairly well with an I7 behind it. Affordable models with the NF200 chip (if there are any) would be a plus.
- Has acceptable overclocking capability. I usually never do anything crazier than high-end air, but I would like to get a decent OC out of this chip. Ideally, I'd want a board that can at least potentially approach 4Ghz with a 920. I don't want to spend $400 on a board, though, and I don't need to set any world records. I spend most of my gaming time playing X3: Terran Conflict, which is both single-threaded and hideously cpu-bound, so I would like to try to get my clock speed up there.
Any CPU cooler recommendations to go with a particular board would be appreciated.
- Supports lots of RAM. I like RAM. I want metric shitloads of it. I definitely want a board with 6 DIMM slots, and I intend to at least eventually fill them all up. Depending on the ETA for semi-affordable 4GB sticks, I may either get 6GB or 12GB now, but I will probably max it out to 24GB once feasible. Most of the X58s seem to be listing as supporting 24GB now, so hopefully this won't be a problem.
- I need at least 6 SATA ports.
What do you guys recommend?
I think I've sold the wife on an I7 920 upgrade for my birthday and the motherboard choices are making my head spin a bit. I need an X58 board that meets the following criteria:
- Can take all my GPUs. The GTX 260s are SLI'd and need full x16 slots. I need the 8800GT for my third monitor. I also am doing distributed computing with CUDA right now, so being able to have that third card is a nice bonus.
It's probably not critical for the third slot to have 16 lanes active, but it would be nice for it not be too gimped as I run an app that is PCI-E bandwidth limited on my current setup (Softth). I wouldn't mind the option of doing Tri-SLI later down the road if Nvidia improves their multi-mon support, as it seems to actually scale fairly well with an I7 behind it. Affordable models with the NF200 chip (if there are any) would be a plus.
- Has acceptable overclocking capability. I usually never do anything crazier than high-end air, but I would like to get a decent OC out of this chip. Ideally, I'd want a board that can at least potentially approach 4Ghz with a 920. I don't want to spend $400 on a board, though, and I don't need to set any world records. I spend most of my gaming time playing X3: Terran Conflict, which is both single-threaded and hideously cpu-bound, so I would like to try to get my clock speed up there.
Any CPU cooler recommendations to go with a particular board would be appreciated.
- Supports lots of RAM. I like RAM. I want metric shitloads of it. I definitely want a board with 6 DIMM slots, and I intend to at least eventually fill them all up. Depending on the ETA for semi-affordable 4GB sticks, I may either get 6GB or 12GB now, but I will probably max it out to 24GB once feasible. Most of the X58s seem to be listing as supporting 24GB now, so hopefully this won't be a problem.
- I need at least 6 SATA ports.
What do you guys recommend?
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