Having big trouble locating a good MB

D

DITC

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 27, 2006
Messages
394
I already have my CPU, E6600.

So my requirements for the MB, is Socket 775, decent overclocking possibilities, good performance, and great stability, SLI.

Here's what's making it difficult though, I have two regular ATA HDs and a DVD burner (IDE), and I'm finding that most boards with my requirements only have 1x regular ATA.
 
The EVGA 680 I SLI is one of the best possible choices, and with a requirement for SLI, and Core 2 Duo compatibility you are pretty much stuck with the NVIDIA nForce 600 series boards. Specifically the 680i SLI, 680i LT, and the 650i SLI.

For the last year or two it's been hard to find boards with more than one IDE port on them. They do exist and I have no doubts you could find one, though I can't think of anything with SLI compatibility that meets that requirement. Seriously you need new drives. SATA drives are cheap now and they will perform better than your IDE drives any day of the week.

There are other things you need to consider as well. Many of the newer motherboard chipsets do not support PATA devices at all. Compatibility is maintained through the use of the JM36x controller chips and the performance is shit. That's about the nicest way I can put it. You won't usually find RAID support for PATA devices on newer motherboards either. An add-in board won't be the best performer either and even if it was a better PATA controller still won't perform nearly as well as new SATA drives. Not to much because PATA is that much worse than SATA but mainly because the drives themselves are more advanced and perform better.

SATA drives are cheap as I said. I've seen plenty of awesome sub $100 SATA drive deals. Hell I wouldn't even keep a PATA optical drive at this point. Samsung 18x DVD-RW drives are around $30.00 now.
 
The MSI P6N SLI either FI or Platinum both have 2 IDE..... These are 650i boards. Some folks have had decent OC'ing with them; me.... nothing real extraordinary but still pretty good-- I've got a E6400 running at 3.0 ghz with ease. It's been a real stable board!

See the sticky at the top of the Intel MOBO section for Hard OCP's recent review. http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1194803
 
I would'nt let that PATA IDE DVD burner drive the descison over your MB. SATA DVD burners are easy to find, even in retail and are becoming cheaper than dirt.

Its just that the choice of motherboard is critical compared to such a cheap and not nearly as critical item as a DVD burner.

Good luck!
 
3degree said:
The MSI P6N SLI either FI or Platinum both have 2 IDE..... These are 650i boards. Some folks have had decent OC'ing with them; me.... nothing real extraordinary but still pretty good-- I've got a E6400 running at 3.0 ghz with ease. It's been a real stable board!

See the sticky at the top of the Intel MOBO section for Hard OCP's recent review. http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1194803
Click to expand...

Well having written that review, I was certainly aware of it's existence and the fact that it had dual IDE ports. If anyone wants to buy that board for a number of reasons, then go for it.

On the basis of keeping IDE drives, I can't understand why you would. If you are interested in SLI, then I have to ask why? Unless you are shooting for 8800GTS, GTX, or Ultra SLI I don't see the point. Lower end cards in SLI isn't exactly an efficient way to do things. Most people will agree that the money is always better spent on a single faster video card rather than two lower end ones. The point that ties into that is this: If you are going to be building an 8800 series SLI rig, I'd think you would be able to afford to replace those IDE drives. I would also think you would WANT to replace them so that you have better performing parts in the machine. Plus IDE drives aren't going to get more popular down the road. At some point you won't find IDE ports on motherboards anymore and you'll be stuck with add-in boards which might increase in price at that point. Or even if they don't you'll eventually see a day when PCI slots won't be around and then what? To my knowledge no one makes a PCIe IDE controller and if there are any, I doubt they are cheap. Again, for how long will those be in production?

Now if you are building something lower end, as someone already mentioned the board shown in the review meets your requirements. To that end, you can buy a cheaper board that is as good or better, and the difference in price would go along way to buying an SATA hard drive. Now if you are dead set on keeping those particular IDE drives because they have data you don't want to lose, I have two things to say. 1# Just throw in some cheap ass IDE controller card and keep using those IDE drives for storage. 2# If the data is that important to you then you should have a backup for that data and therefore you should have a means to move that data to a newer SATA drive.

I'm sorry but throwing IDE drives into a SLI rig just seems wrong to me.
 
I am with Dan on this one, and there are a bunch of boards for every type of consumer and user.
 
Thanks a lot for the fast help, and good answers.

I didn't realize that PATA was so poorly supported ("Compatibility is maintained through the use of the JM36x controller chips and the performance is shit") - and that's definitely not something I'd be interested in, and then when the PATA drives are out and having to be replaced I place of course no value on the burner. But in regards to performance, they were just going to be used for storage, not to run applications from, I already have a Raptor which is used for that purpos, but still, nice to keep performance up overall as well.

So then my options for motherboards are of a lot wider range.

As for SLI, yes, I am going to run two 8800 GTX. But since I am on somewhat of a budget right now, my plan was to start out with a single 8800 GTX on a SLI-ready board, and buy a second 8800 GTX together with a Quad CPU in six to 12 months. Possibly also adding more RAM, going to start out with 4GB though, and I probably won't need another 4 in a year, but at least add the Quad and the second GTX.

But I can afford to replace those drives as well, it actually wasn't a money issue, it was more of convenience and practicality... would be nice to be able to not have to transfer those 600 GB to new drives, it's not important data, but I'd still like to keep it.

Now that I'm not going to be placing any weight on having more than one IDE controller, I'm having my eyes on Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4, Asus Striker Extreme and Asus P5N32-E.

I'm not too familiar with EVGA boards so I don't know how the 680 one (or 680 LT) compares with the ones I mentioned above. I'm currently reading up on them now (the EVGA ones).
 
chuck the IDE HDD's into USB 2.0 enclosures and bin the burner :)
like Dan said, there's not much point building a high end SLI rig and then have old IDE drives acting as a performance bottleneck, especially when they are so cheap to replace with SATA HDD's
 
odex said:
Thanks a lot for the fast help, and good answers.

I didn't realize that PATA was so poorly supported ("Compatibility is maintained through the use of the JM36x controller chips and the performance is shit") - and that's definitely not something I'd be interested in, and then when the PATA drives are out and having to be replaced I place of course no value on the burner. But in regards to performance, they were just going to be used for storage, not to run applications from, I already have a Raptor which is used for that purpos, but still, nice to keep performance up overall as well.

So then my options for motherboards are of a lot wider range.

As for SLI, yes, I am going to run two 8800 GTX. But since I am on somewhat of a budget right now, my plan was to start out with a single 8800 GTX on a SLI-ready board, and buy a second 8800 GTX together with a Quad CPU in six to 12 months. Possibly also adding more RAM, going to start out with 4GB though, and I probably won't need another 4 in a year, but at least add the Quad and the second GTX.

But I can afford to replace those drives as well, it actually wasn't a money issue, it was more of convenience and practicality... would be nice to be able to not have to transfer those 600 GB to new drives, it's not important data, but I'd still like to keep it.

Now that I'm not going to be placing any weight on having more than one IDE controller, I'm having my eyes on Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4, Asus Striker Extreme and Asus P5N32-E.

I'm not too familiar with EVGA boards so I don't know how the 680 one (or 680 LT) compares with the ones I mentioned above. I'm currently reading up on them now (the EVGA ones).
Click to expand...

The NVIDIA chipsets do maintain IDE compatibility so they have the best IDE performance out there now, but SATA still will out perform the IDE drives just by virtue of being of newer design. They do of course still make IDE drives but they still won't perfom quite as well as their SATA brothers and who wants ribbon cables in their machines anymore? You no longer need to suffer with them since everything can be replaced with SATA now. Finally on that point most all of the NVIDIA 600 series boards only have one IDE port anyway.

The GA-N650SLI-DS4 would be using the 650i SLI chipset. The 680i SLI and 680i LT are higher end chipsets than the 650i SLI is. Really the best NVIDIA 600 series boards tend to be the EVGA boards as they are designed by NVIDIA. The EVGA boards are actually not manufactured by EVGA at all but by another company, and then they are purchased by EVGA and other companies like BFG and then sold to the public under those brand names. The EVGA 680i SLI is in my opinion one of the best boards you can get. Avoid the Striker like the plague. First off they are one of the worst boards at overclocking quad core CPUs, memory compatibility isn't as good as it is with the EVGA boards either.

The P5N32-E SLI and P5N32-E SLI Plus are both very similar to the Striker Extreme and even share the same PCB. The P5N32-E SLI is exactly the same minus the LEDs, eSATA ports and LCD Poster. The P5N32-E SLI Plus is just like the P5N32-E SLI except that it's an odd chipset configuration. Basically it's a 650i SLI instead of a 680i SLI. The Gigabyte N680SLI-DQ6 isn't as good as the EVGA boards either and it's very expensive. I personally can't stand Gigabyte's chipset cooling solutions because they use this rediculous mounting plate on the bottom of the board that prevents the installation of many after market cooling solutions. So modification and or removal of that will be necessary on many enthusiast machines.

I have personally owned, or reviewed all the boards in question with the exception of the P5N32-E SLI Plus. Morry reviewed that one and although decent enough, it's kind of an oddball and I think the EVGA boards are superior. Let's not forget customer service either. ASUS sucks at it and EVGA is pretty good.

I currently own two EVGA 680i SLI's and one ASUS Striker Extreme. I had purchased the P5N32-E SLI and resold it quickly. It was for a customer machine that I built but I had it long enough to get to know it and it was ok, but essentially the same as the Striker.
 
I read in a review something about on a lot of new MB you lose a PCI slot when running a 8800 GTX card because of the layout and spacing problems or something, and when running SLI you could even be unable to use both PCI slots. How's the EVGA board in regards to this, because I noticed it like most new MB have only 2 PCI slots, and I need to use both.
 
odex said:
I read in a review something about on a lot of new MB you lose a PCI slot when running a 8800 GTX card because of the layout and spacing problems or something, and when running SLI you could even be unable to use both PCI slots. How's the EVGA board in regards to this, because I noticed it like most new MB have only 2 PCI slots, and I need to use both.
Click to expand...

I lose a single PCI slot and one PCIe x1 slot by having two 8800GTX's in SLI. There is still one left as there are two regular PCI slots total, and I have one PCIe x1 left over as well. My third PCIe x16 slot is taken by a single slot PCIe x4 storage controller.

What the hell would you need two PCI slots for?
 
I have two audio cards, one for music production (M-Audio card) and one for gaming (X-Fi).

I don't lose any PCI slots with just a single 8800 GTX?
 
odex said:
I have two audio cards, one for music production (M-Audio card) and one for gaming (X-Fi).

I don't lose any PCI slots with just a single 8800 GTX?
Click to expand...

Nope. You can also get into water cooling and make the 8800GTX's single slot instead of dual slot.

The Corsair Nautilus 500 would get the job done and it's not that expensive at all. I'm quite fond of mine, though I'm replacing it soon because I am about to seriously expand my liquid cooling loop to include motherboard chipsets, quad core processor and memory. The Nautilus can do two 8800GTX's and a dual core CPU with a moderate overclock. Brent did this in an 8800GTX water cooled Edition review. So I know for a fact it can handle it.

I know water cooling can be a scary concept, and I avoided it for years mainly due to cost and putting liquid into my seeming like a bad idea. It also sounds complicated if you haven't done it yourself, but once you get into doing it, it becomes quite a rewarding and fun hobby. Plus there is nothing like the silence it can offer as well. Combine that with the performance and it really is worth while in my opinion.

It's alot to absorb, but really you can have your cake and eat it to. SLI'ed 8800GTX's with single slot cooling is possible.
 
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