This discussion has inspired me to upgrade more than just the processor, so I have been searching for an ideal motherboard, but the best that I have found so far is an Asus ASUS M4A88TD-M/USB3, but it is too limited on expansion slots. I don't think that I would upgrade to any MB that wasn't SATA 6, and it would be nice for it to have USB3 also, but if such a critter exists, it would probably have a bigger price tag than I could handle.
Here is a better board:
ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 Motherboard - AMD 890GX, AM3, DDR3, USB, RAID, ATX at TigerDirect.com
But one thing confuses me...the onboard graphics. In another ad I found on this board, it said that it was Crossfire, which of course is ATI, but I want to use my EVGA GTX460 SC. Would that create any kind of compatibility issue?
Last edited by seekermeister; 27 Jan 2011 at 03:12.
it is just the card for crossfire you would need the bridge and a ati card that will match the onboard crossfire requirments but since you are using a single card there is no need to fear
either your card will automaticly turn off the onboard or you'll just have to do it through the bios
Biostar boards are actually pretty decent boards. Ive used 3 or 4 of them for builds and have yet to have any issues out of them. Some of them were lacking in the bios dept. as far as OC features, but overall the boards themselves were just fine. Can't really say anything bad at all about them.
You may also want to check into Gigabytes offering as well as ASUS.
If your going to be getting into alot of Video Encoding, a Quad Core will certainly make a huge difference over a Dual Core system in this situation.
Once you decide on the board you like, I would suggest at least 4GB of RAM and a nice Quad.
The part that confused me is that with a SLI rig, the two graphic card require a bridge between them, and I doubt that is possible with one onboard and one discrete card, especially when one is ATi and the other is Nvidia. However that is not really important to me, because I don't want to SLI or Crossfire.
What is more important to me, is that I read that when a single card is used, it has to be installed in the lower x16 slot, and for it to perform at x16, instead of x8, it require that a power card be installed in the upper x16 slot. I need all of the slots for other uses, and if I had to use the upper x16 slot in this fashion, I would be short one slot.
I should have read your post, before my last post. The question is, can a Nvidia card be Crossfired?Solarstarshines;115QUO3016 said:
No, but it does depend on the motherboard.
If the board only supports crossfire, you must run ATI cards to run multipile cards.
If you prefer Nvidia, youll need to have a board that supports SLI. And obviously you must run Nvidia cards for multiple GPUs to work.
The exception being something like x58 chipset, that supports either or. But it will be clearly labeled.
Single cards will run fine on either type of board however.
Have you thought about using encoding software that makes use of your graphics card? The GTX 460 (which is a fricken power house) is more then capable of handling video encoding, but I am going to guess you are not encoding to h.264? I don't know if it can do more then h.264.
If you can use the GPU, you will free the CPU up greatly and even probably speed up the encoding process.
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