Is this mobo & cpu combo a good deal? Also 16x vs. 8x crossfire questions.

[fergieboy10]

i5 4670K & MSI MPower @ $389

I'm assuming that the MPower board from the combo above is this one.

Is there any reason I should go for this higher end board? I'm mainly interested in overclocking, but some of the features seem neat. As long as I can crossfire and overclock stably though; I'm fine sacrificing some of the features for a cheaper board.

This board only supports PCI-e 3.0 8x bandwidth per card during crossfire. Would that be enough for next gen games @ 1080p @ 30FPS? I tried to find an answer on a few other threads but mostly I saw people throwing out the same "1-3% decrease in framerate" which considering the nature of Bandwidth doesn't make sense to me (very likely I could be wrong about this though).

Also if you have some board recommendations post them. So I'll have something to look for during sales. Thanks for your time.

 

[Tradesman1]

I myself, and most builders I know won't touch MSI mobos for client builds, I'd look to Asus for a Z87, they seem to have the best handle on the Z87 s, I decided on the Asus Maximus Hero after numerous builds, might also look at the Z87-Pro (V edition), Gryphon and the the Z87-Plus, all are great mobos.

 

[fergieboy10]

I myself, and most builders I know won't touch MSI mobos for client builds, I'd look to Asus for a Z87, they seem to have the best handle on the Z87 s, I decided on the Asus Maximus Hero after numerous builds, might also look at the Z87-Pro (V edition), Gryphon and the the Z87-Plus, all are great mobos.

Yeah I heard somewhere that MSI's were either hit or miss and more often a miss than they should be, and coupled with the fact that sellers always try to throw them into combo deals makes me a bit skeptical of them, so I'll look at the Asus boards now. Still though do you know anything about x8 vs. x16? I did a bit more research, and I've heard that there isn't a card yet available that has a fast enough VRAM speed to fully utilize the speed of the 8x PCIe. Is this true?

 

[Tradesman1]

Due to the PCI-E lanes available in Haswell, you're basically tied to 8x8 when SLI or XFire, which isn't really going to hinder you that much that you'd notice, it's sort of like SATA , the HDs available (many of them SATA III designated, can't even fill SATA 1 or II bandwidth, , the X79 has the lanes to run full 16x16, but prices rise with that, can go a quad core and mobo in X79 for a little more than the i7 4770K

 

[fergieboy10]

Due to the PCI-E lanes available in Haswell, you're basically tied to 8x8 when SLI or XFire, which isn't really going to hinder you that much that you'd notice, it's sort of like SATA , the HDs available (many of them SATA III designated, can't even fill SATA 1 or II bandwidth, , the X79 has the lanes to run full 16x16, but prices rise with that, can go a quad core and mobo in X79 for a little more than the i7 4770K

Thanks for the in-depth reply although I'm not quite technically competent to understand it; Its nice getting a thorough answer.

 

[Tradesman1]

Just a little something I made up off the top of my head ---- just kidding! You can can check into specs on the various CPUs and mobos, and then explore further from there, if you have any particular questions post them up and/or feel free to PM me, be glad to help