Gaming Rig Advice - Also First Time Build

Don't skimp on the mother board. That's your lynch pin for adding better components later.

Yea lol my MB i am very happy with cause it has DDR2 (my old MB was ddr1 ) and it has 2 PCIe
BTW it says Crossfire on the Box, could it support SLI??

-Braydon

smarteyeball said:

Don't skimp on the mother board. That's your lynch pin for adding better components later.

Thats a very last resort thing, im sticking with the P5Q-PRO unless i really have to cheap out.

brayway said:

Yea lol my MB i am very happy with cause it has DDR2 (my old MB was ddr1 ) and it has 2 PCIe
BTW it says Crossfire on the Box, could it support SLI??

-Braydon

That board im not to sure on even if it could the second card would be a bottleneck because the second PCIe is only 4x not 16x so there wouldn't be much point with SLI or Crossfire on that board. On the board im getting it has different modes so you can run both PCIe's at 8x instead of 1 16x and 1 4x

Hmmm....then why would they put this on the box?

They have that on the box because it can run crossfire but the second card will be limited, it will still work but it would be better off getting a better single card so it can run at full speed

brayway said:

Hmmm....then why would they put this on the box?

Marketing.

The performance hit of x8/x8 is only noticeable at resolutions like 2560x1600. However the performance hit of x16/x4 is huge at any resolution, rendering crossfire useless.

And any board that is crossfire certified only, will not support SLI and vice versa.

Thank you for verifying that i was just taking an educated guess from what i have been learning

No worries mate. I looked into it around the time I went crossfire.

hmm....okay....so would the seond slot be good for a high peed SSD or Sound card, or wifi?? lolz

brayway said:

hmm....okay....so would the seond slot be good for a high peed SSD or Sound card, or wifi?? lolz

Yeah im not sure but it might be good for either..

Anyone know anything about Zalman PSU's particularly the ZM850HP, Or what about an Antec TP QUATTRO 1000W?