Value for money OC board

Hi all, need a bit of advice. I'm looking to upgrade my PC and have set myself a budget of £400.

At the moment, £240 is going towards products I am not changing (Radeon HD 4870, case and PSU) and the rest is for a motherboard and anything else I might need. The new setup will have my current E6750, which I plan to overclock. I also intend to get another 4870 somewhere down the line.

So, what I would like to know is this: what motherboard generation (P35, P45, X38, X48) would you recommend? Specificly, what board would you recommend? I'm not looking for ultimate performance, just something with CPU OC options and Crossfire support. I would like to keep the price floating around the £100 mark, because I want to get a few more bits and pieces (CPU cooler, new mouse or a sound card etc).

EDIT: Also, would it be worthwhile upgrading my current 2GBs of DDR2 PC-5300 RAM to 2GBs of PC-6400 RAM?

Thanks for looking

Anyone?

What motherboard do you currently have?

For true Crossfire support P35 chipset is out of the question, as it is 1x 16X PCIe1 + 1x 4X PCIe1, so the second slot would be bottlenecking the 2nd video card.

X38 has 2x PCIe1 16X and X48 has 2x PCIe2 16X, the newest chipset P45 has 2x PCIe2 8X which is supposed to be the equivalent bandwith of 16X PCIe 1, and has been shown to bottleneck on the HD4000 series but only at very high resolutions, slightly at 1920x1200 and quite severly at 2560x1600.

My recommendation would be a P45 board such as the Asus P5Q. They cost about $115 USD/CDN, so should be sub £100 (not sure about UK prices sry), overclock great, lots of features, and Crossfire support in dual 8X PCIe2 mode. Unless that is you plan on using an extreme resolution like I mentioned, then it might be worth it to spend the extra on an X48 for your Crossfire setup.

As for the RAM, for stock settings no, but for overclocking it could come in handy if the extra FSB is required.

Great choice on the video card btw, 4870 is a beast.

Cool, thanks for the advice man. I'll be running a 1280x1028 so no worries about high res bottlenecks! My mobo at the moment is a ****ty G33 MicroATX Foxconn board with 1 PCIe x16 slot and no OC options at all. Pretty much anything would be an improvement!

I was worried about bottlenecking the card on a non x38/x48 board, but from what you said with my low res that shouldnt be a problem.

At your resolution (1280x1024) a second 4870 in Crossfire hardly seems necessary, I use the same resolution and can tell you there is no game you won't be able to play maxed at using that resolution, with the exception of possibly Crysis, 4xAA with max settings is probably the highest you could do (as opposed to 8xAA on other games).

Unless you plan on upgrading to a larger LCD in the future, I see little need to go faster then a single 4870 for a whiles to come.

Unless you plan on upgrading to a larger LCD in the future, I see little need to go faster then a single 4870 for a whiles to come.

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Precisely my point I want to be able to slap a second 4870 in there when it becomes necesary, which it inevitabely will. Games are getting better all the time, so theres no harm in being prepared for the (albiet distant (at least in terms of gaming)) future

Squishier said:

Precisely my point I want to be able to slap a second 4870 in there when it becomes necesary, which it inevitabely will. Games are getting better all the time, so theres no harm in being prepared for the (albiet distant (at least in terms of gaming)) future

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The problem with that line of thinking is the assumption a year down the road you'll be able to find a 4870, things change so damn fast anymore, a year from now you'll be scouring the forums for a used one.....LOL