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I'm still looking at possible configurations for the PC I'm going to get in Feb/March, and one of the things I've been confused over is the motherboard. Looking through the prices for different motherboards, from different manufacturers, there's a huge range from $470 (NZD) for the cheapest Gigabyte board to $1000-ish for the most expensive ones. So...exactly what is the difference between these boards? I want to be able to overclock the i7 by as much as reasonably possible, will the more expensive boards be able to do this better than the cheaper ones? And which are simply better value for money?
It usually depends on the brand and the options added to the board itself. Which boards are you looking at?
AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE @ 3.22| ASUS M3A78-EM | 4GB G.Skill DDR2-1000 (@ 860) | HD 4870 @ 775/975 | SunbeamTech 680W | Windows 7 Pro x64/Arch x64/Gentoo x64 Asus K50AB | AMD Turion 64 X2 RM-75| 4GB DDR2-800 | ATi Mobility Radeon HD 4570 | Windows 7 Home x64/Debian Tesing x64
It usually depends on the brand and the options added to the board itself. Which boards are you looking at?
The Gigabyte GA-EX58-DS4 (NZ$470), the MSI X58 Eclipse, (NZ$854), the Asustek P6T Deluxe (NZ$669.38), plus a few others I can't remember right now. I'm looking mainly at overclock ability in comparison to price, as far as my usage for features would be concerned, I think they all have more than enough USB ports and such than I need.
Another concern I have is whether they support quad-SLI (none of the specs and reviews made it clear to me whether they did or not, and I don't know whether if they just support 2- or 3-card SLI it means they support 4-way) since I plan to buy a GTX 295 (cheaper in new zealand than GTX260 SLI and mostly better performance), and a possibility in the future would be to add another card to increase graphics performance. It's not as major as the price and overclocking ability, but its still something to consider.
And Stalker, for your information the EVGA board sells in new zealand for closer to 800. But the ASUS looks about right.
I would say go for the Asus board. From my experience Asus boards will clock like crazy. If you're willing to spend some cash I would say get a DFI board though. Stay away from MSI and Gigabyte makes some decent stuff.
Newegg users are usually retarded.
Most of the time they would go into a bios on a board like that and screw with one of the memory settings then say the board doesn't work because its a POS when in reality they get a board too advanced for them and they just want to blame it on something else.
I seriously suggest you get atleast 10 Sata ports, or 8 standard and 2 or 4 "Special" sata ports (Like the fail "GSATA" gigabyte do)
You can never have enough sata ports, Currently, if MSY who did the warrenty for my EX38-DS4 didn't stuff up and give me a new board accidently (I never told em they upgraded me ) I would have to run a PCI Sata board to have enough sata ports, I run 8 sata devices, and would like to upgrade further, but can't without spending shit loads on getting a PCI Sata raid board.
I'd personally get the Gigabyte, and not just because its cheap as pie, but because I trust the name and I'm a bit biased towards Gigabyte, I've seen and had more issues with Asus, MSI and nVidia boards, but thats just my personal experience*Waits for people to argue with my experience and bad luck*
Kow, If majority of newegg users say something is shit, it usually is, besides you can tell the BS posts from the non BS posts and can tell if someone is just retarded
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Tech Discussion 
X58 motherboard question 
) I would have to run a PCI Sata board to have enough sata ports, I run 8 sata devices, and would like to upgrade further, but can't without spending shit loads on getting a PCI Sata raid board.
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