Need help with decision

I am looking to build up a new C2D setup with the E8500, my question is that I will want a mobo that has SLi or Crossfire support, I'm not having any problems finding a good mobo with Crossfire support (Maximus 2 is on my top 5 right now) but I would also like to have a good, reliable, stable, oc ready mobo with SLi support.

This will mainly be a gaming rig, so obviously based upon the mobo I will either go with a ATi 4870 or GeForce GTX 260. Any suggestions would be great. TIA

-Biggie

I will go with crossfire , SLI motherboard are only based on NVIDIA chipset.

I think most of folks here are going to suggest CrossFire. If you must have a SLI recommendation, EVGA 790i FTW.

I remember hearing there were some serious bugs with the 7 series boards, any truth to that? Also I would be using DDR2 so the 790i wouldn't work for me, maybe a 780 or 750 FTW? Or is a P45 board really going to be the way to go?

Yes I use the search button

I had a 780i what was quite reasonable and EVGA now has a 780i FTW. My guess (obviously, I don't know) is that with a E8500 you could get ~3.6G and have SLI available.

Long term we'll don't know how Nvidia's move to open SLI to the X58 (Nehalem) motherboards will go nor do we know what if any motherboard manufacturers will pay Nvidia's fee to enable SLI on their boards.

All in all if I were going to build a new setup as you describe that was going to last me a couple years, I would go either P45 or X48. P45 (some boards -not all - have 2 X8 PCIe slots) will get you good video in CrossFire. You want excellent video then go X48 that will give you 2 X16 PCIe slots in CrossFire. All depends on what your requirements are and how you will use your computer.

EDIT: You might also check with the folks in the video forums. I don't consider myself a video expert. I game a little but more often I'm working with numerical simulations.

Thanks for your input deeppow, sounds like crossfire is the way to go, I have been wanting to get my hands on a 4870 anyways