P45 v.s. X48

[steppinthrax]

I'm looking at boards. I'm not happy with the fact that the P45 only does crossfire in 8x. But a lot of the X48 uses ddr3. Does it make much of a difference. A lot of the reviews show the X48 boards actually perform better with gaming....

 

[harobikes333]

Right now DDR3 isn't worth the money.

Just an FYI

 

[Roguestar]

Most crossfire cards don't saturate the x8 interlink IIRC (and the newer ones have their own internal bridge too).

DDR3 is more than twice the price of DDR2, for about 10% of the performance increase. Do the maths - it doesn't make too much sense to buy it right now .

 

[myocardia]

Are you aware that 8x on a PCIe 2.0 board is exactly the same bandwidth as 16x on a PCIe 1.1 board? That means that there's only one card you can buy that will be affected in any way, the 4870X2. And in case you weren't aware of it, a single 4870X2 is all anyone needs, since it will be CPU-bound even with a 4Ghz quad.