Which Mobo would take...

[Caecus Veritas]

my system spec is listed on sig. i think my current mobo passed away. can't be sure. mobo lights up green but nothing powers up at all. tried stripping it down to the bare minimum with another power supply but still can't get a beat.

anyhow. i have 2 options. one is to perhaps look for the same mobo. or - i have a spare Core 2 Duo lying around, and i was thinking about upgrading to use the new cpu. but i do want to keep the crossfire setup for now. are there any boards out there that can support both crossfire and core 2 duo? or should i just replace the mobo, vid card and ram?

 

[AmberClad]

Originally posted by: Caecus Veritas
are there any boards out there that can support both crossfire and core 2 duo?

- Any X48 and X38 Intel chipset boards will support AMD Crossfire.
- P35 chipset boards can technically do Crossfire as well, but it's not so ideal, because the second slot will be running at x4.
- P45 can do Crossfire with both lanes at x8. The performance difference is negligible compared to X48 in some games. In Crysis, there's a performance hit. See here for details.

 

[heyheybooboo]

The ABIT IX38 Quad GT at $180 AR looks to have potential: PCI-E 2.0 2x16 CrossFire, 6 x SATA 3Gb/s, 2 x eSATA 3Gb/s, firewire, native 1600 FSB, nice goodies and tweaks. Throw in your C2D and 4Gb of DDR2 and you'll be good to go.

PCIe 2.0 is definitely lookin' good with the graphics power comin' out.

Maybe you could find some parts and a used s939 mobo on ebay - use it as a file server, htpc, backup etc ...

 

[Caecus Veritas]

Thanks!

 

[jjmIII]

P5Q is a nice board, and a bit cheaper.......8x 8x though, as pointer out by Amber above.

 

[Caecus Veritas]

do you think an x1900 crossfire setup would even push the 8x 8x boundary?