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patneela
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motherboard

Post by patneela »

What is the best crossfireX motherboard and processor? I'm going to get the Sapphire Radeon HD 5870. What is the best motherboard and processor for this video card?
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Last edited by patneela on Thu Apr 07, 2011 6:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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CoFree
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Re: motherboard

Post by CoFree »

well man for the most psrt its up to you
with thoses big cards
i would make sure i had the extra slots for what every may come up

over all for a good normal mobo i stick with intel most of the time
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HaGGardSmurf
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Re: motherboard

Post by HaGGardSmurf »

If your using ati card's you should go amd.

Crossfire on an intel board or sli on an amd board gets messy.

As for the processor, a phenom ii 955, 965 or 970 will work nicely. a hexcore (6 core) cpu is pretty well overkill, the only real use for a hexcore is if you are doing alot of video editing and rendering. Most games now a days will only use 2 or 4 cores, same with applications.

955, 965 or 970 are all black edition quad cores, meaning they have unlocked multipliers and are damn easy to overclock. I have a 955 and haven't had a reason yet to overclock it handles everything I throw at it.

As for the motherboard, you will need an AM3, and your going to want to make sure it has a good chipset. I'm not sure if you know but just because a motherboard has 2 pci-e 2.1 x16 slot's that doesnt mean you can use run 2 x16 cards, most motherboards will knock the bandwidth down, so one will run at x16 and the other at x4.

What your going to want to look for is board's that can run dual x16. Lots of people say that running 2 cards at x8 will only be a difference of a few fps in most games, and a few benchmarks show that also. So if you want to save a bit of money you can get a dual x8 setup, since all the dual x16 board's are enthusiast boards, and are in the $250 - 300 range. (Dont know how much your wanting to spend on this whole rig)

Since your on an am3 board your going to need DDR3, amd systems benefit from tighter timings as opposed to a higher clock speed. You'll only ever really need 8 gb of ram, again anything more is useless it'll be very rarely used. So you should look at dual channel 4gb kit's with a low cas latency, and tight timings.

When you look at ram and it says 7-7-7-21 those are the timings, which are measured in clock cycles I believe, and are basically the time it takes for the information to be requested from the stick, the time for the information to be found, and the time for it to be returned. 7-7-7-21, or 8-8-8-24, or 9-9-9-27 are tight timings, 7-8-7-24 or 6-8-6-20 are not as good.

As for speed, 1600mhz is a very popular speed, and it is an overclock. So if you look for 1600mhz ram look for 1.5v, if its 1.55 or 1.6 or higher still, your going to need to up the voltage in your bios, which means your going to need to boot with different ram, get into bios, set voltage, turn off computer, install 1600mhz ram, and boot up. Quite a hassle, plus running at those voltages will increase heat and usually decrease life. With 1.5v ram you shouldn't have any troubles.

As for the motherboard it's really up to you, if you read through my post you should have enough info to find a decent board, I find asus to be the best AMD board available, on the intel side the best board is usually MSI. Asus makes a bunch of boards with a mem ok button, which makes life MUCH easier if you are running overclocked ram (1600mhz or higher). Onboard video doesnt matter, so you can disregard that and any features that have to do with onboard video like hybrid crossfire x. If your a gamer you will probably want to get your own sound card, so onboard sound doesnt matter.

So I recommended you go asus and just take a look at all the things ive pointed out, and make sure the board will have enough sata port's for everything you run, onboard raid if you use it, if not you can get a raid card. IDE is pretty well obsolete but if you have something you want to use that is IDE make sure the board has an IDE connection. Take a look at the power connections on the board make sure your power supply will be compatible (if your cpu needs 2 6pin connectors make sure your PSU has 6 pin, almost all boards are 24 pin) Another thing to look for is sata 6 and usb 3, sata 6 isnt a huge deal, only really needed for the latest generation SSD's and the 6Gb/s speed it already maxed out, so they'll probably come out with a 12Gb/s port or something soon. USB 3 is something you should look for, its MUCH faster than 2.0 and once 3.0 phases out 2.0 you'll be happy you have usb 3

Also, make sure you get a big enough power supply to power everything 2 5870's need something like a 600w power supply I believe. Google power supply calculator and it'll tell you exactly how many watts you will be drawing.

Also, take note of the size of motherboard, you wont be able to fit an ATX board in a micro atx case, etc...
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