5punk

I want a new toy to go in the gonk.

I'm undecided between:
This bundle (with the shitty heatsink, as I'll WC)

And buying these separately

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 Intel X58 £232.98
Intel Core i7 920 D0 Stepping (SLBEJ) 2.66GHz £197.99
OCZ Gold 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C8 £126.98

Which ever is cheaper. Unless either motherboard has a particular feature you want, or the bundle has an OC warranty, they're both rather similar so I'd put it down to cost.

FWIW, the Gigabyte motherboard appears to only support two x8 PCI-Express (x16 total lanes to the CPU) for dual GPU setups so if you want to run SLI/CrossFireX, then go with the ASUS.

I'd go with the OCUK deal, as I was looking at it myself plus what Deject said, plus the OCUK with the cheap heat sink work out £17.98cheaper, and thats a bottle of something...

I'm pretty wary of asus, due to boot issues with my raid card.

Whereas I'd happily say go Asus as I've not experienced any problems with them.

The Asus P5N was a great workhorse, but haven't tried their newer boards. Since it'll be ocock doing the overclocking, I'd investigate what sort of warranty you get with them and whether it voids any manufacturer ones, especially since you'll be changing the sink. ocock's customer support is second-to-all.

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:I'm pretty wary of asus, due to boot issues with my raid card.

If the dual videocard thing doesn't bother you, the Gigabyte board seems to be better equipped than the Asus one. I haven't heard anything particularly bad about their boards either.

I've no need for dual video cards as I have a 4870x2, which'll get replaced with a single card option when the 6x00s appear.

Still, I'm undecided.

I've been running an asus m2n-sli and it works fine for what I need it to do.

Problem I have (repeatable, confirmed and existing on 2 mobos) is that asus has trouble when you use onboard raid, and offboard raid, the only workarounds are not doing that, or unplugging all the offboard raid drives on boot.

I'm not sure any other maker would be any better, but the problem's unlikely to be worse.

I'd generally go Gigglebyte, but you know I like their mobo's. The overclocking on the nehalems is apparently as amenable as the earlier c2q's so a bit of water closet should see you get plenty if you want it. As to whether it's needed, I doubt it.

Only thing I can think of with gigabyte is their s.m.a.r.t thingy in the bios tends to shag raids, but you don't need it anyway.

Well then go with the Gigabyte. It does have more stuff (more e-SATA, etc.) and Gigabyte quality as well.

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:Problem I have (repeatable, confirmed and existing on 2 mobos) is that asus has trouble when you use onboard raid, and offboard raid, the only workarounds are not doing that, or unplugging all the offboard raid drives on boot.

I'm not sure any other maker would be any better, but the problem's unlikely to be worse.

You've answered your own question then haven't you?

buzzmong wrote:
You've answered your own question then haven't you?

I just assumed he wanted some confirmation, so I was giving it to him to keep the illusion that he hadn't made up his mind.

I'm still actually undecided, but nice to get thoughts from others.