Personally my vote goes to the Rampage 4 extreme, regular or black edition followed by the MSI big bang II

 

if you have the money, I would say ASUS rampage iv extreme or rampagee iv black edition as they have an additional 6 pin power connection to supply additional power to the motherboard.

 

ok, so not an asrock extreme11 or an asus p9x79-e ws.

the only reason im asking about those two is because i want to know what performance difference will be between
4 cards in
x16/x16/x16/x16
rather than 4 in
x16/x8/x8/x8.

would the the lower bandwidth be an issue? especially if i will be using the 6gb versions of the 780 ti which hasn't been released yet.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132053 no questions about it
Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeffery1995

ok, so not an asrock extreme11 or an asus p9x79-e ws.

the only reason im asking about those two is because i want to know what performance difference will be between
4 cards in
x16/x16/x16/x16
rather than 4 in
x16/x8/x8/x8.

would the the lower bandwidth be an issue? especially if i will be using the 6gb versions of the 780 ti which hasn't been released yet.

No differances what so ever will be noticed even at x4 speeds high end cards on a PCIE 3.0 bus don't care.

 

I'd get the regular rampage 4, the black one is a turd right now, bios needs a lot of work. I gave up on the 2 I had and went back to my first rampage, it's been great.

 

Both the ASUS P9X79-E WS and the Rampage 4 Extreme(BE) would be pretty suitable imo.

 

Ok, thats good, but what about the 8 phase cpu power on the rampage 4. the asrock extreme11 board has 24 phase. how will that affect overclocking capability and stability for the cpu

And concerning an sli bridge, could the cards run through the mb itself because there is so much bandwidth with pcie 3.0 or is that a software restriction? I know the r9 290 and 290x can with pcie 3.0

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeffery1995

Ok, thats good, but what about the 8 phase cpu power on the rampage 4. the asrock extreme11 board has 24 phase. how will that affect overclocking capability and stability for the cpu

And concerning an sli bridge, could the cards run through the mb itself because there is so much bandwidth with pcie 3.0 or is that a software restriction? I know the r9 290 and 290x can with pcie 3.0

NO SLI requires a bridge to run properly, will not let you enable without one.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeffery1995

Ok, thats good, but what about the 8 phase cpu power on the rampage 4. the asrock extreme11 board has 24 phase. how will that affect overclocking capability and stability for the cpu

The advantage of the rampage IV is the stability and legendary quality. Asrock is extremely inconsistent.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by ShortySmalls

NO SLI requires a bridge to run properly, will not let you enable without one.

ok, so it would be software then. cant really change that

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jameswalt1

The advantage of the rampage IV is the stability and legendary quality. Asrock is extremely inconsistent.

thats too bad. i wish they were more consistent because the specs are so good on the extreme11, except that tiny fan

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeffery1995

thats too bad. i wish they were more consistent because the specs are so good on the extreme11, except that tiny fan

Don't worry the rampage IV is an absolute BEAST

 

P9X79-E WS requires good airflow over the heatsinks.
Both the P9X79-E WS and the X79 Extreme11 use a PLX chip (or two) to manage their PCIe lanes. This allows for better card-to-card transfer, in 4-way performance than the standard layout. Though it all depends what resolution you are running at if you can take advantage of the extra FPS (i.e. going from 220 to 230 FPS is relatively useless).
ASUS Rampage IV motherboards are your best bet for CPU overclocking however. The Black Edition is designed more for Ivy Bridge-E.

I've reviewed all of the above for a top tech website, which I cannot mention here due to forum rules. Search Google for either of these motherboards and I usually appear as the first review in the list.

 

Why spend all the money on 4 cards and not get the best motherboard? P9X79-E WS and the X79 Extreme11 are the top x79 boards.

RIV is probably the best cpu overclock specific board, but P9X79-E WS is also known to get high ram speeds and not bad at all for overclocking.

 

Most expensive != best. Otherwise I have a £20000 motherboard for you.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeffery1995

Ok, thats good, but what about the 8 phase cpu power on the rampage 4. the asrock extreme11 board has 24 phase. how will that affect overclocking capability and stability for the cpu

The number of phases means nothing. 8 phases is plenty, and the quality of the MOSFET, capacitors, and chokes is much more important than how many total phases the VRM design has. The VRM configuration of the RIVE Black Edition or P9X79-E WS is more than capable.

What the P9X79E-WS and Extreme 11 really brings to the table are PLX PCIe switches that allow full x16 communication on more than two slots. You still have 40 lanes to the CPU with X79, but the PLX switches route the lanes to the devices based on bandwidth requirements at that moment instead of reserving bandwidth by slot. The downside is PLX switches introduce latency as it's another device between the GPU and CPU that isn't necessarily present on the boards that 8x 8x 8x 8x Quad SLI.

I think my two favorite quad SLI boards at the moment for X79 is the RIVE Black Edition. The P9X79-E WS a close second, P9X79-WS (non-E) and RIVE original edition behind those.

Greg

 

Yeah i will definitely have good airflow over the board itself, and i know that the focus for gaming should be on the gpu's not the cpu because you are more bottlenecked by the gpu than the cpu when gaming, but i guess once you have that kind of bandwidth it becomes less important.

 

After 2 months of fighting with ASROCK for the 2nd RMA on my Z77 OC Formula i said im never getting ASROCK again... my RMA agent left for materinity leave and only she could handle my case so here i sat without a motherboard for 2 months, even though i sent many emails wondering whats the hold up.

I would not touch ASROCK with a 50ft poll

 

some more

...I'm running three boards w/quad GPUs side-by-side (started out as a deskputer project but is becoming more like a 'Frankenputer'

). This includes a RIVE Black w/4x 780 Ti Classies, a RIVE w/2x 7990s (4 GPUs via 2 Plex on the cards) and a Z77 MaxV-Ex w/Plex on the mobo and 4x DC ii 670s...for X79, either the RIVE or RIVE BE are great choices

A couple of quick additional points:

- w/ 4 GPUs, CPU bottlenecks are s.th. to watch (more so than w/ two cards)

- I hope you're planning to water-cool the 4 cards, because 4 air-cooled cards will really 'choke' each other (the 780 Tis and 7990s are water-cooled), even when not over-clocked and just gaming

- if you don't plan to overclock (either the CPU or the GPUs), you might be able to get away w/ a single, powerful PSU...but on both X79 / Quad GPUs, I run dual PSUs 'to feed them' as I experienced GPU power-related BSODs when 'oce'ed...

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by ShortySmalls

After 2 months of fighting with ASROCK for the 2nd RMA on my Z77 OC Formula i said im never getting ASROCK again... my RMA agent left for materinity leave and only she could handle my case so here i sat without a motherboard for 2 months, even though i sent many emails wondering whats the hold up.

I would not touch ASROCK with a 50ft poll

Same here.

I had an Fatality board (don't ask) which was DOA, and then the Extreme 11 for quad 290x...that was also DOA.

I would never buy ASRock again.

 

ok, so i will get an Asus P9X79-E WS then