Crossfire owners......advice please

[magoo]

I'd like to Crossfire two 3870s.

I have a Q6600 and DDR2 Ram.

Motherboard please. Goal is OC of the Quad to 3.1 GHz.

I don't know anything about Crossfire. I've always had SLi, but this 3870 is pretty cool and I'd like to see what two could do for me.

 

[rennyf77]

easy, x38 or x48 chipsets. the x38's use to really suck at overclocking; duals and quads. bios updates have really helped. the x48 chipset is not very different from the x38. buy smart and put down money on the cheaper x38 boards.

 

[mavalpha]

I'd say skip X38; either go all the way with X48, or save your money with P35. It has three downsides compared to the X48 at the top:
1) PCIe v1.1 instead of v2.0. Big deal.
2) x16/x4 Crossfire instead of x16/x16. Again, big deal.
3) No peer-to-peer writes, so you have to use the bridge for Crossfire- no lower end cards. Yet again, boo hoo.

 

[magoo]

I'd say skip X38; either go all the way with X48, or save your money with P35. It has three downsides compared to the X48 at the top:
1) PCIe v1.1 instead of v2.0. Big deal.
2) x16/x4 Crossfire instead of x16/x16. Again, big deal.
3) No peer-to-peer writes, so you have to use the bridge for Crossfire- no lower end cards. Yet again, boo hoo.

Would the PCI-e 4x on the second slot make a difference in performance, compared to the dual 16x????
The two boards I'm looking at: ASUS P5K Pro (P35) and the Gigabyte X38 DS4......
the DS4 has the advantage of dual 16x, I don't know how it OCs.
The P5K Pro is much cheaper.