Building a new PC, part 5
Apr. 6th, 2008 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philmophlegmMotherboard
The motherboard choice is dictated by the graphics card and CPU choice. For a system with a single graphics card, the motherboard would be less vital, but once you have two or three, you are much more restricted. Most motherboards only have one PCI-E x16 slot for fast graphics cards, and even those that have two or three will only work with either two (or three) NVidia cards or two ATi cards.
So you would think that perhaps there isn't that much choice once you've chosen your processor and graphics card, but even then, with my high end choices, there were still a couple of options. I could have gone for a motherboard with an NVidia nForce 780i chipset or the newer 790i Ultra chipset. The 790 is a bit more expensive, but the biggest price difference was the fact that it needed more expensive RAM (more on that in part 6). Still, there were performance benefits with the newer chipset, as well as temperature benefits when running two hot graphics cards. (The 780 suffers from the positioning of its southbridge chip - which gives off heat - being underneath the second graphics card - which needs to be kept as cool as possible.)
So I've bought a 790i Ultra.
The motherboard choice is dictated by the graphics card and CPU choice. For a system with a single graphics card, the motherboard would be less vital, but once you have two or three, you are much more restricted. Most motherboards only have one PCI-E x16 slot for fast graphics cards, and even those that have two or three will only work with either two (or three) NVidia cards or two ATi cards.
So you would think that perhaps there isn't that much choice once you've chosen your processor and graphics card, but even then, with my high end choices, there were still a couple of options. I could have gone for a motherboard with an NVidia nForce 780i chipset or the newer 790i Ultra chipset. The 790 is a bit more expensive, but the biggest price difference was the fact that it needed more expensive RAM (more on that in part 6). Still, there were performance benefits with the newer chipset, as well as temperature benefits when running two hot graphics cards. (The 780 suffers from the positioning of its southbridge chip - which gives off heat - being underneath the second graphics card - which needs to be kept as cool as possible.)
So I've bought a 790i Ultra.
