4
Lord Letto, on 04 June 2013 - 06:53 AM, said:
Hmm, tempted to get the Mobo this week or weekend if I could, Mobo on sale now, $5 instant rebate for the weekly sale, so would be $80+ Tax, not $85 like normal
Edit: gigabyte ga-970a-d3 is the cheapest of the AM3+ Socket SATA 3 6GB/s Mobos for the week, $15 Instant rebate till the 10th and the $10 MIR till the end of the month makes it $70+Tax, $10 lower then the MSI, though the MSI Supports SLI, while the Gigabyte only supports Crossfire, not SLI.
Edit: gigabyte ga-970a-d3 is the cheapest of the AM3+ Socket SATA 3 6GB/s Mobos for the week, $15 Instant rebate till the 10th and the $10 MIR till the end of the month makes it $70+Tax, $10 lower then the MSI, though the MSI Supports SLI, while the Gigabyte only supports Crossfire, not SLI.
You know, trying to get an SLI-capable motherboard will cost you. Even thinking about Multi-GPU setups brings up a whole slew of considerations, many with as-yet unresolved uncertainties, that will horribly complicate your build. I'm not saying don't give it thought, but be prepared for those considerations.
As of right now, dual-GPU setups are not worth your time because neither Nvidia nor AMD has solved dual-GPU microstutter, so your tangible performance gains will be small, at best, even if benchmarks report large framerate increases (hence why some review sites like Tom's are transitioning away from FPS as a performance measurement). That means that the best thing to do is stick with the best single card you can afford. OTOH, AMD and Nvidia are working on solving this issue, and I'm told they're both pretty close, which might make a setup of two budget cards worthwhile, but then you're left with the fact that AMD has been far better at the budget end than Nvidia for several generations. Even now. Nvidia's offerings aren't really very good below the GTX660 TI, value-wise, and that's not even considering the game bundles AMD is throwing out there with their cards.
As I said, dual-GPU setups create a lot of new considerations, and you're paying a lot to get a mobo that will allow you to use a dual GPU setup, of which the utility remains wholly questionable until that damned MS problem is fixed. Since there's no ETA on that being fixed, and the attempted fixes may well not remedy the problem, I'd suggest just sticking to a single-GPU system, especially given your budget. If you want to upgrade, just sell your old card and pick up a newer one. Focusing on motherboards with just one PCIE x16 slot would probably save you 20-30 bucks, money you could put into getting a more powerful GPU in the here and now.
Edited by Catamount, 04 June 2013 - 10:24 AM.
). not to mention the fact that one day you could Change CPU(4100 to 8350) and still have headroom for gtx770 780 or titan(with Xtra large PSU of course) to go above and beyond 1080P on the same MOBO (literally most games don't use all threads, yet) by than you could run SSDs, liquid cooling 1440P monitor in 3D. Only thing I know for sure is I want future proof-ability. Ease of upgradeability is good. **edit** call me stubborn but I didn't want to go SLI when I built my rig, had I know that 760s in SLI were gonna be so 
