Thinking of getting this board

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Update: Now my reset button doesn't work either. I unpluged the header and reconnected it but Nope no good. I did reinstall my raid 0 but I don't trust it for 5hit.

Thats a nice board you got there, i'm stuck on my cheap Gigabyte DS3L. Wanna trade? lol

Thats not a bad board at all I have that one in my HTPC and have never had any problems at all. It sat on a shelf for 6+ months I hooked it up and it started no problems what so ever.

...I need a good recommendation for a really good mobo DDR2 now please, Thanks

What CPU are you using?
If my Gigabyte (GA-P35-DS4) were to die I'd probably try a DFI of one sort or another.
Maybe this one...

I am going to stick the q6600 in it until the newer chips come out so I'm going to need a speedier FSB I think.

This is the board you would go with really? Seems a bit "low tech" for the likes of you man. 800Mhz fsb ram standard and no Esata ports on the board. Only 6 sata headers. Hmmm C'mon man I know you of all people can do better that this

y not ABT IP-35 pro ? Rock Solid and overclocks well ..

I'll look into this one I like the FSB being 1600 but I don't know much about ABit boards.

What do you guys think of these??
ASUS RAMPAGE FORMULA Comes with a sound card!? Oddly I can't find info on the asus site ,weird

ASUS P5Q Deluxe

[hmhef]

to reply to the original post about P45 vs. X48:
the main differnce is that X48 has the ability to make both GFX slots work at 16x speed when crossfired, where in the P45 , if one card , then it works at x16, but if added another card in crossfire, then it drops to x8 each

to make sure on any other diffrnces check asus website :-)

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From what I'v read it not 8 each. The 1st card will stay at 16 but the 2nd will only go to 4.

[lynx]

From what I'v read it not 8 each. The 1st card will stay at 16 but the 2nd will only go to 4.

That was true for the P35.
The P45 chipset can handle both at 8x.

But is an Intel chipset even the right solution at all? If you are going to be adding lots of peripherals (and, based on your question about the sata ports, I assume you are) then you might want to consider other options.

Intel still haven't grasped the nettle and sorted out the bottleneck that is the link between northbridge and southbridge chips. They've almost got the southbridge chip sorted out with the ICH10(R). Other than that, 6x3Gb/s Sata, 12x480Mb/s USB2.0, 6x0.5GB/s PCI-e x1 etc sounds great, until you work out that all that data can't go anywhere because the link between the Northbridge and Southbridge chips is only 2GB/s. The sata buses alone can overwhelm that sort of performance.

Presumably they base this bottleneck on the assumption that no-one will utilise ALL the availabe bandwidth, but the point is that people who want to build high performance systems will do exactly that. Intel just don't seem to be able to produce advances in more than one field at any one time. While they are busy advancing one area of their business, the rest seems to stagnate. The smell from this stagnant pool has surely got to be getting embarrassing.

Intel may have stolen the lead in processor design, but they've still got a long way to go in terms of chipset interfaces. With the bandwidth of HyperTransport 3.1 now over 25GB/s (over 50GB/s bi-directionally), Intel has a lot of catching up to do.

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You smart bastard! Whats the solution then? Go AMD?

[lynx]

Having looked at what's around, perhaps the Nvidia 790i chipset?

Unless you are serious about needing Crossfire of course.

To be honest, I can't work out what the graphic card designers are playing at. To my mind both ATI and Nvidia need a big slap. The original offerings of SLI and Crossfire needed motherboard support to balance out the bandwidth on the PCIe bus. With the latest PCIe 2.0 bus allowing independent x16 channels there's absolutely no reason whatsoever why that should be necessary, considering that SLI and CrossfireX both have their links via over-the top connections. The only possible reason why it shouldn't work is if they are breaking the PCIe 2.0 standards, and if they are doing that they need 2 slaps.

It's like a bus company saying that not only do you need a ticket to ride on the bus, they also have to tell the driver to look out for someone who may have a ticket, yet the bus will still run no matter what. Absolutely crazy.