need help picking a board

I am going to be building my new computer in Feb. I was looking at the ASUS Maximus but I am not sure if it is the best board for me. I REFUSE TO USE GIGABYTE AT ALL! I am very open to suggestions. The specs are the following:

i7 at 4.0 ghz atleast and stable.
sli/crossfire ready(i will be running a radeon hd6950 flashed to a 6970 for now as a solo card)
Corsair Pro Gold 750w power supply
Corsair 800d
will be water cooling in a few months.

also would like for it to support triple channel ram

Hey Vortaku -- I'd consider a different system board, as that one only supports dual channel ram.

What socket variant of i7 were you considering? 1155, 1156 or 1366?

Looking at the board he chose, I'm guessing he's going 1155 which only supports dual channel RAM.

I'm surprised you don't want to go Gigabyte since you have the best P45 board in your sig. Anyways, with SB the OCing almost entirely depends on the CPU and not the board. So, the $350 boards will clock very close to the same as the boards that cost half that. SB will do 4GHz in it's sleep, and you could do that with any board.

MattNo5ss said:

Looking at the board he chose, I'm guessing he's going 1155 which only supports dual channel RAM.

I'm surprised you don't want to go Gigabyte since you have the best P45 board in your sig. Anyways, with SB the OCing almost entirely depends on the CPU and not the board. So, the $350 boards will clock very close to the same as the boards that cost half that. SB will do 4GHz in it's sleep, and you could do that with any board.

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I HAVE HAD HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE WITH GIGABYTES TECHNICAL SUPPORT AND RMA DEPARTMENT. When their product works it is a good product. This is my 3rd board in 3 years from them though. So I am pretty much done. I have been told i should change my oc goals to about 5.0 stable because 4.0 is a joke with the new 2600k model. I just saw that most people are running that board and figured it would work, I plan on watercooling a few months after i get the components so that i can oc well! Any suggestion on a board? You can suggest gigabyte but it would have to be a damn good steal for me to even consider it. I know that most people love them and have not had issues with them. I was flat out called a liar and told i was trying to commit fraud when i had to rma a board not even a year old.

I've RMA'd a couple of EP45-UD3P boards and things went well, sorry you've had a rough time with them.

Will you need or want SLI/Xfire support on the board?

I too have RMA 2 mobos to Gigabyte and I will keep buying them. I am with MattNo5ss on this. Seems to be more of the chip then the board this round. HOWEVER it seems with bios improvements people are getting some better clocks.
Me ill be looking for a mid Gigabyte board bout half that price.

Most manufacturers have released a BIOS with "internal pll overvoltage fix" which usually allows for higher clocks. So really any board with a BIOS with that fix and the features you need should do fine for OCing, especially for 24/7 clocking.

Matt, yes i want sli/xfire support. I may not go with it for now but i more then likely will further down the road! I know many people say I just was unlucky with how I was treated. But having family that work in retail I refuse to be treated that way and the management did absolutely nothing about it when it was brought to their attention. that is why i flat out refuse to use their products, I will build a inferior system before using them again. I know its a one in a million chance that would happen to me again but it was a one in a million chance in the first place and i got that one!

I'm not trying to push a Gigabyte board on you or anything, I was just wonder why "no gigabyte" and I understand that now.

The cheapest option with SLI/Xfire would be Biostar's TP67XE (x8/x8) at ~$160. The only downside I see to that board is it only has 5 SATA ports compared to other boards' ~8 SATA ports.

Next, you have Asus P8P67 Pro/EVO/Deluxe (also x8/x8), the only real difference I see between their versions are dual LAN ports on the EVO/Deluxe. So, the P8P67 Pro looks to be the best value of those three. The Pro is ~$185, EVO is ~$210, and Deluxe is ~$240.

Now, if you want x16/x16 SLI/Xfire or triple SLI/Xfire via the NF200 chip then you'll have to step up to the Asus P8P67 WS Revolution or Maximus IV Extreme. The WS has 4 PCIE x16 slots and 3 PCIe x1 slots, there's a PCIe x1 between each PCIe x16 so they're spaced well, this board does x16/x16 or x16/x8/x8 SLI/Xfire. The M4E has 4 PCIe x16 slots, 1 PCIe x1, and 1 PCIE x4 slot, but it's PCIE x16 slots aren't spaced as well as the WS, the M4E does x16/x16 or x16/x16/x8 SLI/Xfire. Another main difference is the M4E has 8 USB3.0 ports and 1 USB2.0 port, whereas the opposite is the case for the WS with 8 USB2.0 ports and 2 USB3.0 ports. The WS is ~$270 and the M4E is ~$350.

Also, be sure to look at NewEgg CPU/Mobo combo deals.

My choice would be between the TP67XE, P8P67 Pro, and WS Revolution.

I am kind still leaning towards the maximus extreme and just running 4 gigs of ram.

That was a really good break down Matt. I saw a review of the WS Revoloution and despite being a workstation board, its really good all arounder. But I'm finding it hard to find a sandy bridge board that will allow me to use my PCIe wireless card, sli 470's and my
pci sound card

Galganaban said:

That was a really good break down Matt. I saw a review of the WS Revoloution and despite being a workstation board, its really good all arounder. But I'm finding it hard to find a sandy bridge board that will allow me to use my PCIe wireless card, sli 470's and my
pci sound card

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You have the lanes on any NF200 board. Even if you ran those 470's both at 8X you're LITERALLY looking at about ONE frame per second loss.

1-2% is accurate.

In FPS its actually more.

Galganaban said:

That was a really good break down Matt. I saw a review of the WS Revoloution and despite being a workstation board, its really good all arounder. But I'm finding it hard to find a sandy bridge board that will allow me to use my PCIe wireless card, sli 470's and my
pci sound card

Click to expand...

What are you using for a pci sound card, it has to be getting dated at this point. Would it be worth ditching and just going with on board sound? It might help save some dollars on a motherboard. With my latest upgrade I ditched my old pci sound card.

DaveHCYJ said:

What are you using for a pci sound card, it has to be getting dated at this point. Would it be worth ditching and just going with on board sound? It might help save some dollars on a motherboard. With my latest upgrade I ditched my old pci sound card.

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Im running a creative xfi music platinuim or something fancy like that
Also the lanes are there but the problem im having is the placements of said slots
the pcie needs to be on top for the wifi
then the sli setup
then the pci sound card at the bottom this seems to be the only configiration that will support what i needeven more so if i decide to wc the cards

I had an xfi something or other. I ditched it with this latest build. I can't tell a difference in my headphones (Sennheiser HD465). And onboard sound or via hdmi through the graphics card these days has better options for digital streaming so if I go through my receiver I'm better of there too.

Actually one improvement is that when I plug in my headphones I don't get a terrible skreetching sound. My xfi used to do that, I could only plug the headphones in if the computer was powered off.

Ah well, Im a bit of an audiophile (i have a $4000 stereo in my car ) and I tried onboard sound and it wasnt that great. I bought the new high end speakers from Altec LAnsing and the sound with said sound card is pretty incredible. I also have a Logitech g35 but i dont use that as much as i used to.

If your Altec Lansings have a digital input I'd say skip the sound card, otherwise yeah its probably worth it.

yeah its an 3.5mm jack

200, AWESOME sound

get a x-fi hd, great sound card. btw what speaker set is that ^?