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x58 Motherboard advice sought

B

Bolas

Member
Budget of about $7000-$7500 total for the computer.

So far I've bought:

3 refurbished 30" NEC 2560 x 1600 monitors, $2200
1 Intel Core i7 980X, $1070
1 Intel X25-M G2 SSD 160GB, $470
1 Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 64mb cache 7200 RPM HDD, $110
1 Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit OEM, $130
1 Corsair Obsidian 800D, $300
1 Silverstone Strider ST1500 power supply, $400
1 Panasonic Blu-Ray Burner, $190

That leaves around $2100-$2400 to get motherboard, memory, and graphics cards.

I'm roughly planning $350-400 for the motherboard, $400-$425 for the memory, and $1400-$1600 for the graphics cards.

Memory, I'll probably get either 12 GB Corsair Dominator 1600MHz or 6 GB Corsair Dominator GT 2000 MHz. Guess I'm just a sucker for flashy colored heat sinks.

Graphics cards, I'm thinking either dual Radeon HD 5970's or triple Nvidia Fermi 480GTX's, depending on which performs better and is actually available. Neither one is in stock online at the moment, at least as far as I can tell.

Undecided on motherboard still. Some options: Gigabyte GA-X58-UD7, EVGA Classified 3-way SLI, Asus P6T6 WS Revolution, Asus P6T7 Supercomputer, Asus Rampage III Extreme.

I'll probably try to match colors with the motherboard, memory, and graphics cards as much as possible. So a consistent theme to the colors of the computer. Three of these motherboards are blue and black themes, two are red and black themes, all should (I hope) work with the processor and case I've selected.

I plan to eventually water cool the cpu and motherboard chip set with a 3x120 radiator mounted in the top of the case. I probably won't water cool the gpu's, at least for a while, due to lack of space in the case and lack of funds. Maybe in six months or so, but not any time soon.

I wouldn't mind adding in a dedicated sound card and possibly a dedicated network card. I like PhysX and would probably add in a dedicated PhysX card if I went with the Nvidia gpu solution. These extra cards would probably be things that I request from Santa Claus, not something I do for the initial build, because better graphics cards has more appeal to me than these do.

Any advice on motherboard selection would be appreciated. As for gpu's, I'll wait and see what the Nvidia stuff looks like when it is released tomorrow.
 
I'm thinking three 5870 2GB eyefinity cards might be the trick with that monitor setup.

Rampage III looks really promising.

For the price of the 980X you could buy a 920 and a complete watercooling setup for the entire rig. That's what I would do, unless you need the extra 2/4 cores.
 
BlackDragon24 said:
I'm thinking three 5870 2GB eyefinity cards might be the trick with that monitor setup.

Rampage III looks really promising.

For the price of the 980X you could buy a 920 and a complete watercooling setup for the entire rig. That's what I would do, unless you need the extra 2/4 cores.
Click to expand...

Already bought the CPU, it's in the car at the moment. Seriously considered getting a 930 for $200 at Microcenter, settled on the 980x though. It's a done deal.

I'll still water cool darn near everything, but maybe not immediately. My thinking was that it will be easier for me to later upgrade the cooling than the cpu -- I won't have to throw away a $200 chip or hassle with selling on E-bay. I would think that the 32nm over-clocks better than a 45nm chip, and the shared 12MB on die cache is nicer than the 8MB shared cache. Plus the unlocked multiplier and extra cores don't hurt, either. Better folding and crunching with the extra cores. The point is moot though, it's already bought.

I could do four 5870's with the right motherboard, potentially. But three and more water cooling stuff would be preferable, I think. Rampage III does look promising, it's due out in something like two weeks.
 
I would get the Gigabyte X58A-UD7 and 6GB of fast RAM (unless you need 12GB). Having all six DIMM slots occupied lowers your memory throughput. The Rampage III is going to be awesome too, so I think my choice would be between these two.

As for video cards, I'd wait one more day until the Fermi cards are announced and the NDA lifted. See some proper reviews of the GTX 480/470 before you decide. By the way, anything over 3-way SLI/CrossFire hits a huge wall and sometimes it becomes even slower (even 3-way SLI/CrossFire sometimes). Personally I would just go for a dual GPU setup (either two 5870s or two GTX 480s).

Also the 32nm 980X doesn't necessarily OC better than the 45nm i7s. As Anandtech's review pointed out, it's got two extra cores limiting its potential, so they've only managed to push it to ~4Ghz. I've seen other people getting it clocked higher but that's usually through sub-ambient temp coolings.
 
For that budget, you're not considering overkill with the EVGA SR-2 and 2x Xeon's? Son, I am disappoint.
 
Probably not gonna fit in a Corsair Obsidian...or take a 980X.

I think Tri-fire 5870's is gonna be the way to go. That monitor setup is ridiculous and you are going to need as much video memory per-gpu as possible to get the best eye candy at, what 7680 x 1600? Even the top Fermi card is only gonna have 1500MB memory.

A single 5970 with 4GB (rumored to be happening) of memory might do the trick as well, which would essentially be two 5870 2GB cards if OC'd properly. You could then still add another 5970 or 5870 for quadfire/trifire.
 
SunnyD said:
For that budget, you're not considering overkill with the EVGA SR-2 and 2x Xeon's? Son, I am disappoint.
Click to expand...

I did consider it, and I waited until after the current round of gulftown xeon processors were released to determine what cpu to buy. When gulftown came out, the only money I had spent was on the three monitors.

Checking six core cpu's, the prices were all $1k to $1.7k each wholesale, and higher than that retail. Sometimes sickeningly higher.

The motherboard would also only fit into a huge case, increasing my case price.

If my budget for processors is roughly $1k, then I could get two slow quad core xeons with crappy multipliers or one hexacore 980X with an unlocked multiplier. With the extra cost of the motherboard ($200 more) and the extra cost of the larger case ($300 more) I would end up with a single quad core instead of a hexa core due to the increased cost of other components stealing from my cpu budget.
 
-Just looked at your build log, and saw the earliest Pentium 4 I've ever seen... and I thought you were joking about this build. You're gonna grease your pants. Congratulations on your freakish parts list. Oh - your Daughter is adorable.
 
@OP: Aren't we in an economic recession? 😉

dac7nco said:
-Just looked at your build log, and saw the earliest Pentium 4 I've ever seen... and I thought you were joking about this build. You're gonna grease your pants. Congratulations on your freakish parts list. Oh - your Daughter is adorable.
Click to expand...

I had the 1.3GHz Williamette P4 (with included RDRAM modules) and used to think it was great...at first. I grew to hate it when all of my friends got Northwood P4s.
 
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