Some motherboard advice?

[GIBSON]

Hi all,

I've been looking into putting a new system together and am a bit uncertain as to which motherboard to get. Currently these are looking interesting:

*Asus P8Z68-V PRO
*Asrock Z68 Extreme4
*Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
*MSI Z68A-GD65

any recommendations/comments/..?
(doesn't need to be from the above list btw)

[Blacksmith1]

*cough*darkside*cough* I'm not qualified to advize you on Intel Boards. I've been doing the AMD fan dance too long.

[PP Mguire]

Really it all depends on what features you want, then go for the board that supplies them all. I've been looking at the Gigglebyte ud4 and eVGA P67 for quite some time now myself.

[Dragon]

out of your choices the asus will give you the most features.

[Joshua_Mahr]

If you plan on running a SSD for you main drive I would look into the P67 boards. However if you want a cheap 30GB ssd to do the Intel Rapid thingy stick with the Z68. Like Dragon said Asus will give you nice features for the money. Gigabyte can to. I have Used all 3 Makers and ASROCK was the easiest to set up. Asus had the most features and solid power. Giga is great and has never let me down. MSI i cant really say I have not used their products in years. If you give us a better idea of what you want to do with the system we could give more helpful input.

[PP Mguire]

My latest experiences with MSI where great. Those where all AMD boards though.

[GIBSON]

If you plan on running a SSD for you main drive I would look into the P67 boards. However if you want a cheap 30GB ssd to do the Intel Rapid thingy stick with the Z68. Like Dragon said Asus will give you nice features for the money. Gigabyte can to. I have Used all 3 Makers and ASROCK was the easiest to set up. Asus had the most features and solid power. Giga is great and has never let me down. MSI i cant really say I have not used their products in years. If you give us a better idea of what you want to do with the system we could give more helpful input.

Why would P67 offer an advantage over Z68 in that area? (Please do fill me in if I've overlooked something there!) I am planning to use an SSD as my primary drive for OS and applications. The intel solution (though not bad for a certain audience) seems a bit half-fast to me :smile:
Reason I went for Z68 was for the ability to use the integrated GPU for processing purposes (quicksync), though I'm obviously going to use discrete graphics most of the time. A second reason would be that it's simply a newer chipset :grin:

Currently the asus board is looking most favorable, followed by the asrock one. Thanks for all the replies btw!

[Joshua_Mahr]

If you plan on using the igp then yes z-series.

[GIBSON]

If you plan on using the igp then yes z-series.

Not sure if it's going to be used much (I've read the quality is less than that of software conversion) but if I go the Z68 way I'll always have the option to. Is there any other reason to go P67 except price? (You mentioned something aboud SSD's?)

[Joshua_Mahr]

I was talking about the ability of the Z series to do the rapid cache but if you can afford the bigger sized ssd it is not needed. Price and overclocking with out the igp getting in the way.

[GIBSON]

I was talking about the ability of the Z series to do the rapid cache but if you can afford the bigger sized ssd it is not needed. Price and overclocking with out the igp getting in the way.

I might be wrong here, but I thought igp and 'cpu' (ALU and FPU would be more accurate I suppose..) are independent overclocking wise? Or is that something I misread/misremember?

[Joshua_Mahr]

When you overclock on the P67 you do not have to worry about Igp thats all. Just another setting not to have to mess with to get your clock.

[Victor]

I reviewed the asus board and I like it a lot. It's stable and has a very nice UEFI user interface. The board is easy to oc and good designs.

[GIBSON]

Thnx for the advice everyone! It's most probably going to be the asus board.
Only minus the board has is the PCIe x4 slot that only works in x4 mode by disabling a few other interfaces (eSATA, the extra USB 3.0 etc if I remember correct). Would have liked it if they solved that problem like asrock did by creating extra lanes with an extra chip on the board. But then again, it's not like I'm going three-way SLI/crossfire so no biggy :smile:

[Dragon]

the pro will have 2 x8 lanes distributed on the 2 full length PCI-E ports. The short Time I ran a similar Asus board (p67 EVO) I never needed the x4 PCI-E lanes on the last PCI-E port. That is running 2 6970's, and a Creative Sound blaster X-FI Fatality Pro card, along with a Killer 2100 NIC (I was testing it out on various types of machines) WHich filled every available PCI-E port up, and I had no issues.