New to AMD, please advice!

[orion23]

Hi
I am about to go AMD with a new FX-55 San Diego and have some simple questions, hopefully you guys can help me out.

1: Which is a better, faster board, the Nforce4 Ultra, or the Nforce4 Ultra SLI? (not interested in using 2 cards, just overall performance)

2: Which is the best board to buy? Which would you guys recommend?

TIA!

 

[Jazic]

SLI, you wont regret it. Just pickup a decent card with SLI enabled and a year or so when your lookin to upgrade save a ton by just upgrading with another identical card. After having my computer a month or so I'm sad to hear that ATI is building a dual card motherboard soon... /cry

 

[furballi]

SLI has more bells and whistles. I'd go with the NF4 Ultra. Perhaps a different brand if you don't intend to do XTREME overclock. There's not much room to overclock the FX-55.

 

[Jazic]

Again SLI has lots of room for upgrading... Say you only have the cash to buy a Geforce 6800 GT at the time you build your system. A few months down the road you could easily add another card with 2x the power... Much cheaper than getting a single PCIe mobo and will cost you less than buying the best card out at the moment...

Much more pocket friendly over time with the SLI. I personally dont have another $500 to drop on my 2nd card at the moment but in a few months maybe prices will drop a tad and I'll have some to spare by then. Two GF 6800Ultra's are definatly gonna last me a long while. I hope that is.

 

[orion23]

Thanks guys!
I think I'll go SLI.
I'm thinking about the DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR

 

[n yusef]

Don't go SLI. Getting a seccond 6800GT is a bad idea, when a single 7800GTX outperforms it. In another year, two 6800GTs will be even dumber, as the 8000 series will be out, so the $200 mainstream card will probably be faster than two 6800GTs. The nForce4 Ultra and nForce 4 SLI chipsets are exactly the same, except the SLI supports SLI. They have the same exact features. Some motherboard manufacturers make their SLI board different than their nF4 Ultra, but DFI only adds 4 extra (8 total) SATA ports. If you don't plan on using 5 or more SATA drives, or 2 video cards in SLI, get the Ultra-D. It's on the same PCB and uses the same BIOS, so you don't need to worry about not being as good.

 

[Fisher999]

Originally posted by: Jazic
Again SLI has lots of room for upgrading... Say you only have the cash to buy a Geforce 6800 GT at the time you build your system. A few months down the road you could easily add another card with 2x the power... Much cheaper than getting a single PCIe mobo and will cost you less than buying the best card out at the moment...
...Two GF 6800Ultra's are definately gonna last me a long while. I hope that is.

First of all Jazic, I corrected your mispelling of definately. You forgot the "e" after the "t". Secondly, most of your advice does not have much basis in fact. It is never wise to future-proof although admittablyI have done it myself; that is, by the time most people purchase their second card for SLI (when they only buy one and "plan" on buying a second down the road for SLI), the option to purchase a SINGLE better performing videocard is usually the best option on a cost/performance ratio. Also, there are no real-world tests I know of that show a DOUBLING of performance with two cards in SLI; at best I've seen reports of a 50% improvement. And getting the boards to run stable in SLI mode can be problematic at best.

BTW, you are hearing this from someone who recently purchased an ASUS A8N-SLI but NOT because of SLI. I purchased it because I wanted the Asus A8N-E and one was not available so I spent the extra dollars for the basic SLI version of the board. I know I'll never use SLI though. Thankfully for me, my board, unlike most, does NOT sacrifice a standard 32 bit PCI slot to add the second PCI-E slot.

Sometimes an SLI version of a board will have OTHER features like a secondary Gigabit LAN option, or an additional parallel or serial RAID controller, or some other feature one may want. Whether or not it is worth it to pay the "SLI price" to get these features, that are often available on premium non-SLI boards, is debateable.

Originally posted by: orion23
Thanks guys!
I think I'll go SLI.
I'm thinking about the DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR

"Going" for an SLI board is not a good choice for most people for the reasons I stated above. The DFI LanParty nf4 boards are GREAT; especially for gamers and overclockers. Bear in mind that their boards often do not include legacy items like serial and parallel ports so if you have something like an LTP printer you'll need to use you won't be able to use it with the nf4 LanPartys. The nf4 versions of the LanPartys are also very RAM finicky; there have been many posts at this forum by people having compatibility problems with the nf4 LanPartys and RAM.

Originally posted by: n yusef
Don't go SLI. Getting a seccond 6800GT is a bad idea, when a single 7800GTX outperforms it. In another year, two 6800GTs will be even dumber, as the 8000 series will be out, so the $200 mainstream card will probably be faster than two 6800GTs...

THANK YOU n yusef. That is the very point I was trying to make above but you put it much more eloquently. Great Job !!!!

Greg