Which mobo?

[kyp275]

I'm planning on building a new system in a month or so after I get home, and I've more or less settled on the dfi nforce4 boards, and now I'm just wondering which board will best fit my new system.

 

this is the setup I have in mind right now:

 

Athlon 64 X2 4400+

BFG or eVGA 7800GTX

4x OCZ PC-4000 Gold VX 512mb

2x Maxtor Diamondmax 10 300GB

PC Power & Cooling SLI-PFC 510w

 

I don't really see myself going SLI, so I'm more looking for OC features in the mobo.

 

(don't know if I should've put those in the sig, since I don't have any of those parts yet ^^;

 

any help will be greatly appreciated, and feel free to suggest alternative parts if ya see something wrong with that setup

[Semantics]

If you are not going SLI, the choices would only be the following:

 

UT nF4 Ultra-D

UT nF4-D

[evogre3n]

And which is better? in your opinion?

[Shard]

Also for graphics card go for the EVGA 7800GTX KO edition.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2494

[rldolph79]

And which is better? in your opinion?

 

They're basically the same board, but the ultra-d has a few more features...check http://www.dfi.com.tw/index_us_noflash.jsp?SITE=NA and you'll be able to see the difference for yourself.

[kyp275]

Another question, I've heard that the 2nd pci-e x16 slot only functions as x8, is this true for all boards? or just the SLI boards when there are 2 vid cards in? I'm particularly concerned about this since I'm planning on watercooling this system, and it doesn't look like there's enough space there on the 1st slot for me to mount both the vid card and the chipset waterblock.

[Guest Shibby]

Currently, nF4 chipset works as either 16x top slot + 2x bottom slot, or 8x top slot + 8x bottom slot (depending on the jumper configuration). 8x has been shown not to result in performance decreases in the past, but I don't know about the 7800. Nvidia has announced that nF4 will be tweaked to allow full 16x on both slots, but I don't know when this will actually be incorporated into boards.