Need some motherboard advice

[timewarp]

I'm building a crossfire gaming core 2
duo system and i'm having trouble finding a motherboard that will work for me. What i'm looking for is 1) Staibility and 2) Good Performance, in that order. Stability is obviously most important, but performabnce shouldnt be lacking. I'm not a big overclocker, so that feature is not that that important. I'm currently considering these 3 mobos: Asus P5W DH, Intel D975XBX2 and DFI's new Lanparty board for Intel. I would appreciate any suggestions anyone can offer, will one of these boards work or will i have to get something else? As far as the price goes, it is not really an issue, i'm willing pay to get a quality board.

[freaksavior]

I have heard asus are really good boards, i have never been a fan of intel boards (maybe good but still not a fan) i have also heard that the gigabyte d6q can be hacked/modded to support sli or corssfire. so that might be an option

[timewarp]

Yes, Asus boards are good, though tech support is awful, plus this ASUS P5W DH has issues, but so does all other technology. I've heard a lot of people praising Asus, but i'm just not sure if it meets my criteria of stabilityand performance. I never liked Intel myself, boards or processors, however, i've heard that the Intel board i mentioned above is very stable, but dont know how true thats is. The gigabyte board you mentioned is actually crossfire certified so it will worked for crossfire, but not SLI, and has to be hacked like you said. The DFI Lanparty board also looks interesting, loads of features, good reviews, and should be stable enough, it actually looks tempting. But i'm still not sure what the hell to get. :confused:

[xylomn]

Personally I like ASUS, I use the P5W DH Deluxe and its a good board, overclocks well, but it does run hot so good ventilation is a must.

[timewarp]

Personally I like ASUS, I use the P5W DH Deluxe and its a good board, overclocks well, but it does run hot so good ventilation is a must.

How hot does it run and what kind of ventuilation do you recomend?

[xylomn]

How hot does it run and what kind of ventuilation do you recomend?

well after the pc has been on for a good few hours under heavy load you can't touch the heatsinks without getting a nice burn :laugh:

You can easily do a lot of things to improve this though, if you remove the chipset cooler and replace heatsink with as5 that brings down the temps a few degrees also theres a thin cover over the heatsinks that can easily be removed, all they do is restrict airflow, then just basically make sure the hot air is getting out of your case and nice cool air coming in.

The board also comes with an optional fan you can attach to the heatsink, if your overclocking I advise you use it.


Only other thing I would say about the asus board is like all asus boards it does suffer from a very slight vdroop but this can easily be countered

[timewarp]

I see, thanks for the info. I've heard this board has a problem recognizing RAID and some hard drives. I actually plan to get 2 WD Raptors in RAID, does this problem sound familiar?

[xylomn]

Personally I've never tried to add a raid with this mobo, I use two wd drives myself (not raptors) and its had no problem with them, I do know the mobo uses a JMicron chip for doing raid arrays apart from that i can't give you any information

anyone else had experience with the p5w dh deluxe with raid arrays?