Advice for new system

[d2kx]

I got a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme Cooler and Scythe Flex fan for it.

I'm confused about the 2 8800 GT boards, though. I thought SLI setups only worked in 680 or 650 Nvidia boards. I was under the impression you needed motherboards with 2 SLI slots of x16 (lanes) and the P35 board (most of the recent ones) slots are 1 x16 and 1 x4 lane. Can anyone explain or confirm?

You're right! Totally forgot about this... well, the EVGA board should be a good choice then.

[Ole-Martin Broz]

well if ur going extreme you can go ati with quad CF like ima gonna do

Depends on what kind of system you want, the amd 790 FX systems is not US mobo's yet, and supports PCi-e 2.0 and new amd cpu's that is TBA, would reccon waiting till december about computer, no doubt that 8800 GT is a really good videocard for the money, except that nvidia lacks performance in linux as im aware of, but got all functions and such in correct condition for linux.

ati however got this kickass performance, just annonced AA AF vsync configuration ability, but however lacks more functions and got some aiglx bugs though, but its just to wait n see.

[Kano]

Do you think that SLI is really needed? Not all games are getting much faster that way. Usally one card should be enough. What res do you want to use by default?

[Rugmonster]

Okay, it's been about a week now. The box is a beast. I haven't tried any games under Linux, but everything works. Onboard sound works adequately and network interfaces are good. The 3ware controller has no problems and the video cards are working fine. No complaints at all except one dead drive. I'm hoping to have the replacement in before the end of the week. But for those that are wondering, the EVGA nforce 680i SLI (A1 Version) works 100% in Linux, namely Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy.

On another note, I was able to push the processor up to 3.3Ghz, but it was touching 74C under full load, so I brought it down to 3.0Ghz. Now, the hottest core idles around 35C and barely gets to 50C under 100% load.

The trick now is filling up 8GiB of memory.

[steelwire]

I think they're both good boards but I was concerned about only 2 PCI slots. If I want to experiment with a sound card and a TV Tuner card, would I be in good shape still? What other cards utilize PCI? I was going to use a wireless usb adapter rather than pci so I'd have the extra pci slot options. I suppose 2 is sufficient. However, I was comparing the Gigabyte boards to the Abit IP35 Pro since they are all around the same price but the Abit has 3 PCI slots.