Hmmmm. Personally I would rather use an Intel chipset board and skip on SLI. It might also be a challenge to find such a gaming motherboard at a reasonable price.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Hmmmm. Personally I would rather use an Intel chipset board and skip on SLI.

What's a good Intel chipset for this generation, and what advantages would it have over comparable Nvidia offerings? I have an Asus P5Q PRO with Intel P45 chipset which would work in a pinch, but it only does Crossfire, not SLI.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

It might also be a challenge to find such a gaming motherboard at a reasonable price.

Challenge accepted! 😁

P.S., it looks like the Asus Striker Extreme with nForce 680i SLI would be another candidate.

I've had good luck with Asus boards, including my A8N-SLI Premium (which is SLI for AMD). For the Pentium D I think the 680 is on the newer side - it should work, but if you wanted the full historical accuracy bit I think you'd need either the nForce 4 x16 Intel Edition or nForce 500 series (I forget which one is "right" for Pentium D - basically consider Pentium D was competition for the early Athlon64 X2s, so whichever nVidia chipsets those used). I'm not sure if there's any significant performance difference unless you're looking at 2x8 vs 2x16, but even there it usually isn't too big of a difference, especially if you're going with "age appropriate" graphics cards (e.g. GeForce 7).

That said, I'd also tend to agree with Mau1wurf1977 about Intel chipsets. I think either way you won't go wrong with Asus unless the specific board you find is damaged though. 😀

maximus wrote:

What's a good Intel chipset for this generation, and what advantages would it have over comparable Nvidia offerings? I have an Asus P5Q PRO with Intel P45 chipset which would work in a pinch, but it only does Crossfire, not SLI.

From this era, 925x or 975x would be the ideal for an XE. P45 will not work with Netburst.

You'll give up SLI, but the Intel chipsets will also use less power, run cooler, and are generally very stable. CrossFire is supported but I wouldn't bother unless you're going with HD 2000 series or newer (previous generations were kind of a pain if you want the top cards, since you need a 'master' card with the compositing hardware). You can find HD 2900s fairly cheap on ebay though, so that might be worth considering if you have a power supply that's up to the task (remember, they're one of the more power hungry GPUs in history). 😀

obobskivich wrote:

From this era, 925x or 975x would be the ideal for an XE.

Thanks for the pointers. I originally had my eye on the Asus P5WD2-E Premium with the 975X. I like that it won't support any Core 2 CPUs (keeping an eye on historical accuracy), but again, no SLI. Somehow SLI just seems right for this rig. Either 2x6800 Ultra or 2x7900 GTX, I'm thinking.

obobskivich wrote:

P45 will not work with Netburst.

Hmm, I guess that means Asus is lying: P5Q PRO CPU support list

obobskivich wrote:

CrossFire is supported but I wouldn't bother unless you're going with HD 2000 series or newer (previous generations were kind of a pain if you want the top cards, since you need a 'master' card with the compositing hardware).

Ah, that's another project I have in the pipeline: the ultimate AMD/ATI rig circa 2006 with an Athlon 64 X2 6400+ and a pair of X1950 XTX cards in Crossfire. There's a whole stack of Asus motherboards with the AMD 790FX chipset that would be perfect for this. X1950 Crossfire Edition cards seem to be much easier to find than X850 CrossFire Masters.

If you want something period accurate, go with a 975X Chipset board. Avoid the nVidia boards, their chipsets are defective.

I'm still using a Pentium D 9xx on a production machine. Soon to be replaced with a quad core xeon I hope.

maximus wrote:

Hmm, I guess that means Asus is lying: P5Q PRO CPU support list

Interesting. So - all LGA755 CPUs, except 533 MHz FSB models, are declared as supported...
No info about Pentium 4 EE, Pentium XE and Core 2 Extreme, but they must work. Theoretically. Except QX9770. Multicore is supported, Hyper-threading is supported, FSB speeds 800/1066/1333 are supported.
Good. I will assembly something on this chipset when I found a spare time...

Finding and buy a board on the cheap isn't hard but finding one that isn't junk at a good price is another. SLI isn't hard to work with and have been using it for years but 775 in general doesn't let it shine to its best capabilities as well a few driver bugs. You can however hunt down a board that has an late model Intel chipset and is very stable overclocking wise then use the driver level hack to enable SLI. Most never look but all the hack does is just fool the nvidia drivers into thinking it is running on a SLI certified board even when it is clearly not. All in the registry but support likely has dropped off a year or two ago but for older dx10 games that isn't a big deal. Works even on AMD boards provided crossfire support is there before hand.

To my surprise, the X38 board I have officially supports Pentium 4/Pentium Ds. Seemed pretty pointless by 2008 to support anything Netburst, but there it is.

NJRoadfan wrote:

To my surprise, the X38 board I have officially supports Pentium 4/Pentium Ds. Seemed pretty pointless by 2008 to support anything Netburst, but there it is.

That is very strange for a Core 2 era board, 945 was created for dual core Netburst but had support for Core 2 almost outright including the nforce series.

Well if you really wanted a Netburst machine with PCIe 2.0 and Crossfire, its your board. X38 boards aren't cheap though.

P45 is one of the best lga 775 chipsets, if not, thee best IMO. Could take a wolfdale chip to 4ghz no problem. Remember q9450 cpu being a really sweet choice with that chip (extremely underrated cpu), since it had 12mb cache, 1333MHz FSB and 2.66GHZ clock; could overlock to 4ghz and have 2000mhz FSB with 1:1 ram ratio on good ram (even today that'd be close to piledriver cpu performance. Maybe better?). Intel became legend with their core 2 series IMO. Heck I'm starting to wonder if I should've just got a p45 system instead of piledriver...

maximus wrote:

Hmm, I guess that means Asus is lying: P5Q PRO CPU support list

Very peculiar. Wikipedia and ARK both list is as incompatible with Netburst. 😊

If it works - absolutely go for it; it's a much more modern chipset than a lot of the older stuff, which should mean better memory performance and PCIe 2.0. If historical accuracy is your goal, the 975x or an nForce 500 would be where I'd aim though. If SLI is your goal, why not shop the board off of the GX2 HCL and go with QuadSLI with 7950s? (SLI-AA is pretty cool)

Look here:
http://www.nvidia.com/content/geforce_gx2_sbios/us.asp (note that it isn't absolutely comprehensive, but GX2s aren't universally compatible with all PCIe boards)

Something else interesting about the 975x - at least the Intel 975BX2 will support Core 2 and Netburst; I also vaguely remember the 975BX2 being a popular choice for Hackintosh builds. Still no SLI with two cards, but should work with the 7950GX2. 😀

Ah, that's another project I have in the pipeline: the ultimate AMD/ATI rig circa 2006 with an Athlon 64 X2 6400+ and a pair of X1950 XTX cards in Crossfire. There's a whole stack of Asus motherboards with the AMD 790FX chipset that would be perfect for this. X1950 Crossfire Edition cards seem to be much easier to find than X850 CrossFire Masters.

Again, chipset is newer than the rest... 🤣 (Xpress 3200 is what came out alongside the X1800/1950 series)

The X800 CrossFire solution is also problematic because it limits you to a total max resolution of 1600x1200, but on a CRT that's more like 1280x1024 (it can't do higher than 60Hz at 1600x1200). Something that also comes to mind, if you want to try SLI and the "ultimate AMD rig" - what about a QuadFX system? Of course that doesn't get you a D 965, just a thought I had. 😊