Motherboard

[Hawnted]

Ive seen all the performance benchmarks on the boards out now that support 1333 FSB and SLi. However, has anyone have anything to add on stability? Ive been reading about a lot of stability issues on the 680i boards, just wanted to see if that was still relevant. I just ordered an E6850 and I already have 2 8800gtxs, now i just need a board and some RAM. Waiting on Ram to see if the board i select supports DDR3.

[Qbical]

i love my 680i fifteen

[jdrom17]

Sorry but you have no choice really. Any 680i based board or nothing.
Unless you want to give my one of your 8800GTXs ;)

Any other board really would be no SLI, thus wasting a card. The new Intel chipset coming soon (X38?), is supposed to support SLI and Crossfire. If you can wait that long, it may be an option.

[Hawnted]

There are some 650i boards, didnt know how the stability/performance ratio was on the two.

[jdrom17]

Well seeing as you can afford 2 8800GTXes, I think the 680i is within your budget ;)

680i also has full x16 bandwidth per slot, whereas the 650i only has x8.

[Zefram]

I just ordered an E6850 and I already have 2 8800gtxs, now i just need a board and some RAM. Waiting on Ram to see if the board i select supports DDR3.

For now, DDR3 does not bring any huge improvement over DDR2. The DDR3 is still immature, and it would take some time for the latency to go down and the speed to go up - the same thing happen when DDR2 were first launched. Nobody wanted to upgrade to DDR2 when it was released but eventually the speed was scaling steadily and now everybody wanted a piece of DDR2 :p

For all that's worth, the money spend on DDR3 is better spend on a 1333mhz DDR2 and a nVidia 680i motherboard. And about the question of 680i stability, when it was first released it wasn't that stable due to data corruption on SATA interface and such, but after few BIOS releases the motherboard is a solid performer.

650i is just a cheap'o version of 680i. If you have enough resources to get 2X 8800GTX, why not spend a bit more on a motherboard? ;)

[Hawnted]

If you have enough resources to get 2X 8800GTX, why not spend a bit more on a motherboard? ;)

Thanks both of you for the advice and will do. I was just making sure that the stability issues had been fixed. Most of the stuff I have been reading is from 2-3 months back and there were still concerns.

[jdrom17]

I believe you'll want to get the A1 version. Not 100% sure on that, but I think it's the newest one with quad-core overclocking fixed.

Of course, flash the BIOS when you get it too.

Checkout the eVGA forums, I'm sure they will say there.