- Joined
- Feb 29, 2012
I am looking into LGA1155 motherboards with the plan to build an overclocking rig (2500K 5-5.5ghz target), and was curious what some of the recommendations are (or nonrecommendations/if one was particularily bad) among motherboards that have some kind of pcie lane expanding chip such as the NF200 (or another chip whose name I cant remember)? There do not seem to be an awful lot of these boards so perhaps it's a shorter list to shop among...
I am *preferring* lower cost (under $200 would be nice), and curious what the lower end available is, however things like the ASUS Maximus IV is still on the list due to stellar overclocking performance. (getting 500mhz more on the same chip tested elsewhere, from 4.8ghz to 5.3ghz at tomshardware I think, same air cooler and everything) I'm willing to pay more for certain features however on board features are often disabled when you go 3way/4way so some of that becomes moot.
My primary requirement is the support for 3way/4way SLI options with at least 8x per slot. I'm pretty sure I will want 3way due to wanting to run two video cards plus one dedicated PhysX card for games like Alice actually, and that wants an 8x slot it seems or it starts to slow down at higher levels.
The only other possible preference is an x1 pcie slot at the TOP of the board (near the cpu side) before the 16x slots - this is to run Soundblaster Xfi. I may need it if I actually wanted to run 4 video cards (3 SLI/1 PhysX) which i'm still researching if it's possible with an Xfi, even though the interest and likelihood is dropping due to finding 3D Surround scaling less than i'd hoped thinking 2 will be fine. Besides this would require at least 8 slots (last card overhanging) on an XL-ATX or Ultra ATX board.
What are others using and what have their results been?
I am *preferring* lower cost (under $200 would be nice), and curious what the lower end available is, however things like the ASUS Maximus IV is still on the list due to stellar overclocking performance. (getting 500mhz more on the same chip tested elsewhere, from 4.8ghz to 5.3ghz at tomshardware I think, same air cooler and everything) I'm willing to pay more for certain features however on board features are often disabled when you go 3way/4way so some of that becomes moot.
My primary requirement is the support for 3way/4way SLI options with at least 8x per slot. I'm pretty sure I will want 3way due to wanting to run two video cards plus one dedicated PhysX card for games like Alice actually, and that wants an 8x slot it seems or it starts to slow down at higher levels.
The only other possible preference is an x1 pcie slot at the TOP of the board (near the cpu side) before the 16x slots - this is to run Soundblaster Xfi. I may need it if I actually wanted to run 4 video cards (3 SLI/1 PhysX) which i'm still researching if it's possible with an Xfi, even though the interest and likelihood is dropping due to finding 3D Surround scaling less than i'd hoped thinking 2 will be fine. Besides this would require at least 8 slots (last card overhanging) on an XL-ATX or Ultra ATX board.
What are others using and what have their results been?