Legit Reviews

I'm trying to find something I can reasonably overclock an e6300 or e6600(not sure which I want to buy yet). I'm seeing good reviews of the Gigabyte DS3, but its using the old ICH7. It has the gigabyte chip to add the 2 sata ports with raid, but I really want something that has raid 5 support. So i'll need something with at least 3 sata raid ports(so ich8r it looks).

Altho the nforce 590sli looks interesting, if it ever gets released. :\

does the Asus P5B Deluxe Wifi-AP Edition overclock well at all?

i guess just aesthetically, i would prefer something without pata too. no need or want to have it clogging up space on my board.

ideally here's a shortlist

overclockable
ich8r
no pata
no pci , several pci-e slots (at most 1 pci slot) preferably, none
marvell gigabit port or similarly decent.
*edit* left out one big thing, SLI capable. I'll only be buying 1 7950 gx2 atm, but probably will want another one down the road.

hrmm...
I'm almost thinking of just waiting to see how the Bad Axe 2 board performs when it hits the shelves. I can wait ac ouple weeks. + it has known drop-in support for quad core when I can afford/want to buy one of those.

what thinK?

I can only think of 2 boards that have 2 x16 PCIe slots and Core 2/LGA775 support, but neither officially support SLI.

ASUS P5B Deluxe
GIGABYTE GA-965P-DQ6

With some driver hacks I believe you can get SLI on both of these boards, but it will require some tweaking to make it all work. Both have PATA and I'm not sure how many board will have it totally removed as most optical drives are still require the header.

hrm, perhaps i need to wait til the new nvidia chipset (c55 + mcp55) boards hit in november :\

eh or perhaps i'll just get the reference bad axe2 and go single instead of sli. and just buya g88 when they hit.

hrmm choices choices :D

would you recommend waiting for the bad axe2 or is there an ich8r chipset out now that fits my needs? (without sli) ?

the hacked drivers can get SLI to work no problem on many Intel 975X boards... back in the beta days before the original bad axe board came out it was supported by Intel and NVIDIA and ran fine, so it works fine.

personally unless your either running extremely high res, over 1650 or are a benchmark junky there is not need for sli.