Budget & good board for 650i and 680i

[MicroZ28]

I just bought a P5N-SLI 650i MB.It is a very stable board for me.Running 500 FSB just like my P5B-Deluxe Wifi board.Here is a link for a article on the P5N-SLI.Looks like in gaming versus Striker Extreme 680i that dual 8x vs. 16x isnt much difference at all,In some benches the 650i is actually better.


http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2894&p=5


"We had heard rumors that the 8800 GTX cards would thrive on the dual x16 capable 680i chipset but in looking at the results in our two test games it appears there is very little difference in the scores between the two nForce 600i boards. We did not have any issues running our 8800 GTX SLI setup on the dual x8 capable 650i board and only in the synthetic 3DMark benchmarks did we see any true separation between the two setups. Those results favored the 680i over the 650i by 8% in 3DMark06, 6% in 3DMark05, and in 3DMark 2001 the 650i actually finished about 4% ahead of the 680i. At this time, the current games we have tested will perform almost equally on either board in 8800 GTX SLI operation at 1600x1200. We also tested at 1920x1200 resolutions with the same results between the two chipsets. We still need to complete testing at 2560x1600 with the 650i chipset but considering the very small increase in performance in SLI mode with our test setup, we highly recommend the purchase of a single 8800 GTX for today's games and to forgo 8800 GTX SLI operation at this time.

[Technoholic]

So all this discussion leaves me..

P5N-SLI 650i
P5N-E SLI 650i
P5N32-E SLI Plus 650i
P5B Deluxe
GIGABYTE GA-965P-DQ6 (p965)



To choose from..

Thank you for your inputs. I'll read the thread throughly and see the final decision from there.

One question, if the motherboard has SATA 3gbps, will it work with SATA 1.5 harddrives?

[Technoholic]

Hmm, okay, I'm going with P5N32-E SLI Plus.

[john19055]

I have the Asus P5N-E SLI 650i and it runs at 2040 fine,It is just the memory will not overclock past 1000mhz I wish my Evga 680i SLI would run that high ,it will only do 1650,but the memory will do over 1200mhz.