board recomendation

[IDPA_expert]

In December I will be building a gaming machine with two GTX690's in sli and im wondering which ROG board will be best for this set up. This will only be water cooled H100 style unless theres a an upgrade by then. I dont want a board that defaults to x8 when two cards are installed, should stay at x16 or better if there is such a thing.

[kkn]

then to be honest, go whit a 2011 setup ( dual 16x ( intel ) )
or mabye AMD if they come out whit a new board.
intel can be expensive and mad is cheeper.
but since AMD dont suport pciex v3.0 now i would wait.
there are those that say intel ( i can be wrong so dont quote me on this ) dont handle 3.0 realy well as of now but i can be wrong.
but since your building the pc in december i would wait a lill longer since theres always some thing new coming out.

[HiVizMan]

X79 is the graphic card king and will be for a year or so still.

[IDPA_expert]

I dont see anything new at computex 2012 for the rampage boards, so is rampage iv extreme still the choice if im going to run two gtx690 and i dont want them to default to x8 but stay at x16. Are there any other ROG boards that will stay at x16 with two cards and use 2011 i73960.

[HiVizMan]

The Extreme is pretty much the top dog and will stay that way for some time. The guys put heaps and heaps of R&D into that board, in fact I recall saying in October at the media launch in London to a TV chappie that the motherboard is a game changer and I still think that. From a sheer performance perspective it is tops.

And what you have to remember is that the PCIe management is on the CPU these days not really on the motherboard, what the motherboard design does is maximise that potential and without doubt ASUS have done this with the Extreme. Oh and I am not a blind fanboi either. When SB came out the UD7 board was king for 3D benching the first 6 months, and I still have 4 of them.

[IDPA_expert]

Supreme fx is being touted as the wiz bang onboard dont need anything else integrated sound thingy. Yet we have Xonar phoebus that will enable you to hear crickets on mars but then wait, you can have Lan and xonar together in Thunderbolt. I wish they'd make up my mind before something shorts out. Well I do need to plug in my cable to a router for internet conn. so will the thunder bolt take of that or is there another connection already on the board for that.

[Silver_Wolf]

I can tell you with 100% certainty that the board will have an Ethernet port. I don't think you can get a board without at least one port :).

[HiVizMan]

Yeah the board has one LAN and I too do not see any point of having a discrete sound card as onboard sound is really good these days.