Motherboards and Graphics Cards

[Mr H]

Am I correct when I say you should use a Crossfire enabled mobo with ATI graphics cards?

and a SLI enabled mobo with nVIDIA graphics cards?

Can you mix mobos and graphics cards? eg:

put an ATI graphics card in an SLI enabled mobo?
or put a nVIDIA card in an Crossfire enabled mobo?

I was looking at configuring a custom gaming rig with:

Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-950 (3.06GHz) 4.8GTs/8MB Cache
with a
ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI
and a
1GB ATI RADEON™ HD 5870 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11

This came up much cheaper than using a Crossfire mobo and equivilent 3Ghz processor.

If you only want to use a single graphics card does it matter whether you match mobos and graphics cards?

Any advice would be great!

Thanks.

[PCS]

The P6X58D-E supports both Crossfire and SLi because the chipset is Intel, as opposed to an Nvidia or AMD chipset.

All the options on our configurators are matched and so don't worry about choosing the wrong configuration.

[Sleinous]

Am I correct when I say you should use a Crossfire enabled mobo with ATI graphics cards? and a SLI enabled mobo with nVIDIA graphics cards?

To a certain extent yes :) Please read on.


Can you mix mobos and graphics cards? eg:

put an ATI graphics card in an SLI enabled mobo?
or put a nVIDIA card in an Crossfire enabled mobo?

Nope, you can put a nvid gpu in a crossfire enabled board and vica versa, but what you can NOT do is hook up 2 or more Nvidia cards in a crossfire mobo and expect them to work together when you plug the SLI bridge in inbetween the cards as the mobo wont recognise thsi configuration, and vica versa. Please note many mobos also support both standards.

I was looking at configuring a custom gaming rig with:


Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-950 (3.06GHz) 4.8GTs/8MB Cache
with a
ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI
and a
1GB ATI RADEON™ HD 5870 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11

This came up much cheaper than using a Crossfire mobo and equivilent 3Ghz processor.

No need to panic here, this mobo supports both XFire and SLI, just description doesnt state it.


If you only want to use a single graphics card does it matter whether you match mobos and graphics cards?

As said earlier, nope :)

Hope that helps.

[Mr H]

Thank you both very much :)
Decision made :)

[Sleinous]

Ritey O! No probs