S775 crossfire mobo?

S

snefan

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 14, 2005
Messages
303
picked up another 4850, so i'll need a new crossfire mobo to use it.
i've done a bit snooping around the interweb, but im kinda lost in this sea of different versions and all that.

im looking for a budget version (preferably) with decent OC ability.

how much does the second slot speed affect the performance?

how are the older chipsets (i might go with a used mobo) do against the newer?


recomendations?
 
Personally, I'd get a P45 with x8/x8 crossfire.

Asus P5Q Pro
Gigabyte EP45-UD3P

Those are really the only boards I'd look at unless you need more onboard features. Both are around $100-115 depending on what kind of rebates they are offering.

Other than that, you're looking at an X48 board for x16/x16 crossfire. Not sure you'd notice the difference with "only" 4850's though.
 
Pick up a used X38 / X48 board. Pretty much any one will do. Should be around the same price as a new P45 Crossfire board, and you'll get full speed / 16 lane PCIe slots, which will be useful if you intend to keep the board for any length of time.
 
X38/X48 don't OC as well if you're looking for a high OC though. And the price is usually somewhat steeper. You can get a used P45 board just as easily as a used X38/X48 ;).
 
I think that's a good choice. I've used two separate ones in my personal builds and have had nothing but great luck with them.
 
yeah that'll do you just fine with 4850's, its when you're using X2 cards that a x38/48 would be useful.

the P45 was only better at overclocking quad cores from my experience.... the x38/48 was good with duals.
 
I had the same board with 4870's in crossfire and ran great. Good luck with your new board.:)
 
DiMeLo said:
I had the same board with 4870's in crossfire and ran great. Good luck with your new board.:)
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How hard was that to get setup? I was thinking of adding a 2nd one since 4870's are so cheap.
 
kirbyrj said:
How hard was that to get setup? I was thinking of adding a 2nd one since 4870's are so cheap.
Click to expand...

Crossfire with 512MB cards doesn't really make sense -- if you want Crossfire you're probably better off selling your 4870 and buying a 4870x2 (or 4890 once those are available, potentially), particularly since the P45 will drop back to 8x/8x if you get 2 cards vs. 16x with one card.

As for how difficult it would be to get working? No more or less difficult than any other multi-GPU setup. When it works it works beautifully, when it doesn't there is rarely a fix save waiting for a patch or driver update.
 
silent-circuit said:
Crossfire with 512MB cards doesn't really make sense -- if you want Crossfire you're probably better off selling your 4870 and buying a 4870x2 (or 4890 once those are available, potentially), particularly since the P45 will drop back to 8x/8x if you get 2 cards vs. 16x with one card.

As for how difficult it would be to get working? No more or less difficult than any other multi-GPU setup. When it works it works beautifully, when it doesn't there is rarely a fix save waiting for a patch or driver update.
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you're right, its generally not worth X-firing 512mb cards, but depends what games you play, the 4850's for example scale really well... i play cod4 all the time and they were super blazing.
 
Well, I don't game as much as I used to. Since I'm on 1680x1050, I'll probably just stick with the single card anyway. I ran SLI back with the 6 series Nvidia cards, and I dabbled with Crossfire with the X1900's, but I haven't used this new crossfire setup with all the internal connectors. Looks a lot like SLI.
 
kirbyrj said:
Well, I don't game as much as I used to. Since I'm on 1680x1050, I'll probably just stick with the single card anyway. I ran SLI back with the 6 series Nvidia cards, and I dabbled with Crossfire with the X1900's, but I haven't used this new crossfire setup with all the internal connectors. Looks a lot like SLI.
Click to expand...

Pretty much exactly the same. Very little differentiating CrossfireX and SLI anymore, since SLI now has multi-monitor support.
 
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