New motherboard

[ordos96]

Ok, so i currently have a nice setup with a core i7 920 @2.78GHz, 6Gb DDR3 tri-channel, a 550Watt PS, an ATI HD 5770 ( i intend to get a second for Xfire), couple of hard drives and disk drives. I have an older gigabyte board that i am using and for the most part it runs just fine except it only has four slots for RAM and i would like to be able to upgrade to more while running in tri channel. First i was looking into the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD series as for futre proofing my system the USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 looked very attractive, but with further research i found that in order to use the 3.0 for USB and SATA it had to cripple the first PCI-e port down to 8X and also completely disable the second PCI-e port. For graphics this just looks like a big disadvantage. Are there any other mother boards out there that can do USB and SATA 3.0 without sacrificing the PCI-e port? Or are there some other good boards that i should be considering that maybe have room to add teh SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 later? Thanks for any help that you can offer.

 

[dndhatcher]

You cant put an i7 920 (socket 1366) into a p55 motherboard (socket 1156). You need to look for x58 motherboards.

I dont think there will be such a thing as expanding a motherboard to SATA 6GB or USB3, it has to be built for it or it cant have it.

Are you sure you need more RAM? Its not very common for more than 6GB to be useful.

 

[505090]

no mb with four slots is tri channel, you are currently running single channel

it's going to be a while before sata3 and usb3 become mainstream and are actually useful in anything except rare cases, with that in mind I would not even consider it in your current selection

the only way you can add usb3 and sata 3 to a MB that did not come with it will be to use an expansion card, so if you ever do need it it will only be a cheap upgrade away

perhaps you should just get one more stick on ram so that you will be running in dual channel with 8gig

FYI
either 6 or 8 gigs is a lot of ram that few people can actually use
a 64 bit os is needed to use more than 4 gigs of ram

 

[dndhatcher]

no mb with four slots is tri channel, you are currently running single channel

Thats not correct. There was at least one early x58 board with 4 slots that let you run dual channel in 2/4 slots or triple channel in 3 slots. You had to put ram in slots 1,2 and 4 for triple channel. Goofiest thing I ever saw, but it does exist.

 

[ordos96]

The gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R is my current board it does have tri channel with four slots. I am probably jsut seeing things on USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 now and just don't want it to become common on devices and then need to upgrade while i am currently looking to do my upgrades this holiday season. Also i am running Windows 7 64-bit. I am simply looking to make sure that once i finish with these few upgrades that this PC will last me for a few years. I do alot of multi tasking and i'm sure that right now i have plenty of RAM to have my games up and my work and music up at the same time, but i want to make sure that i can still do this flawlessly by the end of next year.

 

[505090]

well look at that, my mistake

so your upgrading for something you don't currently need... (more ram, usb3, sata3)

if that is the case I would suggest waiting till you need it, at which time you can either buy better stuff the same $, or hopefully spend less on better parts