a question about 890fx chipsets (crosshair iv formula)

[wheeljack12]

I currently have a gtx 580 as my primary card. My friend has two 8800gtx cards that he would possibly give one to me. My question is: can you have two nvidia cards on that board with one the gtx 580 as primary and the 8800gtx as physx card? Or am I stuck with upgrading the the crosshair iv extreme that has the lucid hydra chip on it to get it accomplished. or is the lucid hydra just going to add both cards performance and not allow a primary and physx card? Somebody please help me with this. the reason I went with this board is for usb 3.0 and native sata 3. Otherwise I would have went with the 980a sli chipset motherboard from asus that supports 6 core cpus. but since I invested in a supertalent raiddrive usb 3.0 ($300 cdn), you see why usb 3.0 is important. And with OCZ about to release the vertex 3 with true sata 3 speeds of approx 500mb read and write, I need native sata 3 for when time comes to upgrade. That is the only drawback intel motherboards lack, native sata 3. or at least you pay a motherboards cost to get a raid controller that works like highpoints rocketraid 600 series pci-e cards. And don't kid yourself if you think the sata 3 controllers on intel mb's work as native or bootable controllers. Their secondary storage controllers. For those that have tried to use the sata 3 on intel mbs as bootable, you probably have got a few bsod every few bootups of your pc. The guys at gigabyte even tried to convince me that the sata 3 on the ga-x58a-ud9 mb's controller has been successful in being bootable to win 7. What a load of poop. and I like the idea that the optical drives are seperated to a jmicron controller over mixing ide and ahci optical drive with raid on the crosshair iv formula. Yes intel makes it more simple but with this board I can raid 6 drives and not sacrifice one sata port to the main controller like you do with intel.

[frenchy2k1]

Seconded. For Physx, any MB can accommodate you.
It's only for SLI or CrossFire that the MB needs to be certified.

So, get your friend's 8800 and plug it in if you want.
Not sure you'll see any advantage though...

[wheeljack12]

Originally Posted by slaWter

Why do you need such high bandwidth disks?

Either way I don't think that it was very smart to get an AMD chipset. Native SATA 3 or not, AMD is not known for high performance SATA chipsets.

I would have used a single SSD as boot disk and then coupled a few SSDs to a high bandwidth array using a secondary onboard/PCIe controller. Or why do you need a high bandwidth bootable array?


As for your question, AFAIK you don't need an SLI capable board to use a secondary card for PhysX.

I read reviews on newegg for the highpoint rocketaid 640 and a lot were saying that the rocketraid bios was overtaking control of the motherboards sata controller. I was going to go with a pci-e raid controller, but I thought I could get a mb for the price they sell them for. I am a performance buff and I would like to boot as fast as possible. And the upgrade path I was on with the intel system I had, I was looking at $1000 for 2 way sli every gen and $200 for a controller that might not work. So in my opinion, I saved $500 for a video card and got a mb that has native sata 3 for the price of a pci-e controller that may not like my past and current mb.