[soju]

Okeys. I had a feeling I would be doing wrong if I had just posted this into the "tech" section, so better safe than sorry to post it here...

I was in the market for a budgetmobo that supports either SLI or Crossfire gpu capabilities AND can used with the C2D.

I ran across these suckers:

ASRock ConRoeXFire-eSATA2 Socket T (LGA 775) Intel 945P ATX Intel Motherboard

and this baby:

ECS NFORCE 570 SLIT-A (V5.1) Socket T (LGA 775) NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI ATX Intel Motherboard

To digest, the ASRock supports crossfire, and the ECS supports SLI. Now judging by the customer reviews, it seems as a normal person would have gone with the ECS.

But for some reason, (it was late at night, I was tired) I went with the ASRock. The mobo is slated to arrive on Thursday, but I just might be able to exchange it...

I'm no tech expert so I pose the question for you guys, which would you have gone with?

[CatGoesMeow]

Okeys. I had a feeling I would be doing wrong if I had just posted this into the "tech" section, so better safe than sorry to post it here...

I was in the market for a budgetmobo that supports either SLI or Crossfire gpu capabilities AND can used with the C2D.

I ran across these suckers:

ASRock ConRoeXFire-eSATA2 Socket T (LGA 775) Intel 945P ATX Intel Motherboard

and this baby:

ECS NFORCE 570 SLIT-A (V5.1) Socket T (LGA 775) NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI ATX Intel Motherboard

To digest, the ASRock supports crossfire, and the ECS supports SLI. Now judging by the customer reviews, it seems as a normal person would have gone with the ECS.

But for some reason, (it was late at night, I was tired) I went with the ASRock. The mobo is slated to arrive on Thursday, but I just might be able to exchange it...

I'm no tech expert so I pose the question for you guys, which would you have gone with?

Is there really a choice? If you wanted crossfire you would have to go with ASROCk and if you wanted SLI you would have to go with ECS?

I would have gone with sli, thats just me lol just cuz of the g80's (But the downside to the 570 is they dont overclock to well)

[soju]

^ yeah... i feel you, but I was trying to get a tech. aspect of it..

the only differences between them besides the SLI and crossfire was the "Maximum Memory Supported"...

ASRock having 4gb, and ECS having 16bg... although I personally dont know anyone who has 16gb...

Oh. and the ASRock is 20 pin and the ECS is 24.

Generally speaking, will a Nvidia card run better on a mobo that supports SLI rather than a mobo that supports cross-fire?

[awdark]

Nah doesn't matter
I wouldn't touch the ECS with a 10' pole though. I HATE those motherboards. I don't even take them when they bundle them for FREE at Fry's.

Over the span of 3 months I went through 4 ECS motherboards.
1st one lasted the longest. Gave weird glitches, SATA ports didn't work.
2nd one started okay with windows installed, but wouldn't let me actually install a fresh copy of windows.
3rd one was great. Dead on arrival!
4th one I used for 1 week, did some heavy encoding (about 20 hours worth of AVI->DVD encoding) after that it stopped working.

<3 fry's return policy.

Oh and I have an Asrock 939 dual. Blew the motherboard once with USB. RMA doesn't exist from them so I hope you bought from a place that you can take it back to if it does break. Didn't bother me too much... $40 later I bought a new (used) Asrock 939 dual...
So I like it cos they are cheap and featureful, but I hate it because it doesn't let me overclock past 2.74ghz on my AMD machine. The chip should be able to do 3-3.5ghz...

[soju]

^ hm.. interestingn story you got there.

Anyone else know a good mobo then with C2D and SLI/Crossfire capabilites? (CHEAP is key word here)

[awdark]

I don't htink you can get sli/crossfire. Would there be one you would prefer over the other?

btw, frys has bundled ecs c2d mobos with the E6300 and E6400s for about the cost of the chip.

[soju]

^ yeah.. I meant either SLI or Crossfire... I guess "/" got you confused.

[DaRkViEt73]

if you're going cheap then I'd forget about crossfire/SLI. And I can't really comment too much about the Asrock (it sounds crappy) but as far as ECS mobos... they ARE crap. I wouldn't use it if you paid me $50. They're about as bad as the IWill (fail) mobos. "Good" and "cheap" don't really go hand in hand until you hit around at least the $70-80 range. By then you're getting into the well established brand names Asus, Abit, MSI, etc etc territory... but none of those guys will have crossfire/sli. My advice is to forget it.