Cheap SLI Intel Motherboard

Sxotty

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Ok, I have a core2 2.66Ghz processor, and a Asus p5b-vm motherboad. It is intel based, but has glitchy as heck since I got it. The worst motherboard I have had in ages, though to be honest crashes are not constant or anything, but once every 3-8 days is way to often in my opinion especially when there is no overclocking etc... Anyway I just got a 8800GT so I was thinking about a new motherboard as a possibility as well so I thought I would throw it out here to see if there are any decent models.

I don't really overclock now, I just want a stable experience and the possibility to use SLI would be a bonus.
 
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I have not had problem with the nvidia series other than when the 9650 came out and it was not compatible with the 680 series. I do not know if SLI boards will be less than 100 dollars unless you buy it used from someone...

But I can vouch I had no flakiness. Also the onboard sound setup does a decent job.
 
That board was $109, that is why I said that :p


Anyway there are a number of 6 series boards >100 or right around there.
 
asrock make some cheap boards + they are ok as well

ps: can you get intel sli boards ?
i thought nvidia wouldnt allow sli to work except on its own chipsets ?
 
asrock make some cheap boards + they are ok as well

ps: can you get intel sli boards ?
i thought nvidia wouldnt allow sli to work except on its own chipsets ?

You cannot, but it hardly matters as my current board is intel based and terrible. My favorite boards ever are an Abit BH-6 (Intel based) and an Abit NF7-S. Other than that the rest were just so so, and this current one is bad.

There was a lot of complaints about nforce boards here, so I was wondering if it is a vocal minority or a majority.
 
I was worried when I built my current rig I would have problems but seriously I have had nothing but an awesome experience.
 
SLI ain't worth it. Buy the fastest single card you can, or go CF if you must, but NV's chipsets and drivers are craptastic.
 
SLI ain't worth it. Buy the fastest single card you can, or go CF if you must, but NV's chipsets and drivers are craptastic.
Like I said previously my most stable motherboard ever (in a tie) was an nforce 2. Though it is quite likely their quality has deteriorated significantly since then. There was complaints back then as well, but they seemed less common. I don't really care that much about SLI, but I was thinking about a new mobo, have a new 8800gt and figured in another 4 months I could pick another 8800gt up for incredibly cheap.

Or I could just use what I have an put up with the annoyance and never buy another ASUS or intel chipset again :p

Obviously that would be over reacting since people swear by both companies, but I don't.
 
NF2 was not an SLI board, and I did not say NV has never made a decent chipset. My complaints are directed at their contemporary chipsets.

I have owned NF2 and NF4 boards, btw. Asus and Gigabyte, respectively. Asus was a decent board, but lacked serious overclocking capability so I was a bit disappointed, but that would be my own fault for not doing more research before buying. The Gigabyte OC'd wonderfully though. Had some RAID data corruption issues (lol, ever hear that one before?) but was otherwise a solid board that I recommended to several techie friends to build on and all that did were happy.

My initial comments may be harsh, but I stand behind them.
 
Like I said previously my most stable motherboard ever (in a tie) was an nforce 2.

Except that was an AMD motherboard. The nforce 2, for whatever reason, is considered nvidia's best chipset they've ever released at least as far as stability and reliability goes. The nforce2/3/4/5xx for AMD were/are better than nvidia's motherboards for Intel by a significant margin. The fact that AMD has the IMC and uses HTT for the cpu to chipset interconnect probably is a major factor in that.

Everything that I know from first hand experience with nvidia chipsets for Intel are absolute garbage.
 
Except that was an AMD motherboard. The nforce 2, for whatever reason, is considered nvidia's best chipset they've ever released at least as far as stability and reliability goes. The nforce2/3/4/5xx for AMD were/are better than nvidia's motherboards for Intel by a significant margin. The fact that AMD has the IMC and uses HTT for the cpu to chipset interconnect probably is a major factor in that.

Everything that I know from first hand experience with nvidia chipsets for Intel are absolute garbage.

I thought in the nf2 era they did not use HTT. So that ruins that line of thought. I don't know what Nvidia has done to screw up after such a good success early on.
 
I thought in the nf2 era they did not use HTT. So that ruins that line of thought.
IIRC, nvidia was also being funded by microsoft to develop a chipset to use with the xbox. More testing was probably done on that chipset to get rid of bugs.
 
IIRC, nvidia was also being funded by microsoft to develop a chipset to use with the xbox. More testing was probably done on that chipset to get rid of bugs.

That was for an Intel chip anyway in the xbox (and that was nforce1 right?) Anyway nf7-s was nf2 and amd.

I am over this for now as I am now interested in this beauty.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813153114
Jetway mini-itx mobo that is sweet for a tiny HTPC setup, except not enough expansion slots I guess. What I really want it for is my car though.
 
Except that was an AMD motherboard. The nforce 2, for whatever reason, is considered nvidia's best chipset they've ever released at least as far as stability and reliability goes. The nforce2/3/4/5xx for AMD were/are better than nvidia's motherboards for Intel by a significant margin. The fact that AMD has the IMC and uses HTT for the cpu to chipset interconnect probably is a major factor in that.

Everything that I know from first hand experience with nvidia chipsets for Intel are absolute garbage.

This is true for NF3 and beyond, but NF2 was for K7 which did not feature an IMC.

And yes, NV chipsets for Intel platforms are garbage, at least compared to their Intel counterparts. NV chipsets run extremely hot, have horrid multi-threaded memory bandwidth, and have notoriously poor RAID support (i.e. they corrupt arrays).

I thought in the nf2 era they did not use HTT. So that ruins that line of thought. I don't know what Nvidia has done to screw up after such a good success early on.

Yes.

NV is a GPU company. They don't know chipsets like they do GPUs, and they have a lot more experience with developing chipsets for (less-complicated) AMD boards than they do their Intel counterparts. Must really piss of Jen-Hsun knowing that the answer to their Intel chipset problem is right around the corner (Nehalem) but Intel is playing hardball.
 
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