[tipsycoma]

I need a mobo that will do trifire. But I'm stuck between these two options.

Black Ops
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813186144

ELA
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813186153

They both have trifire compatibility. The ELA will run three cards at x8, while the black ops will run two at x16 and one at x8 (I think). My conflict arises at the price, considering that the Black Ops will cost me over a hundred dollars more than the ELA, because I need to buy new DDR3 ram for it. If I didn't hear rumors about the ELA being a poor overclocker I'd have bought it already. I'm worried that if I don't overclock there might be some extreme bottleneck from my e7400 with trifire 4850s. What should I do?

 

[Enigma8750]

Well with the Black Ops.. This guy said.

Pros: Board is an overclockers dream, amazing amount of options to get maximum performance from your components. In testing and tweaking with the board I've had a QX9650, and an E8400 at 4 gz on air easily. I've also used two different sets of memory, mushkin ddr3 1800 (2 x1 gb), and Corsair Dominatior ddr3 1800 (2x2gb) running from 1600 - 1800 depending on fsb. Never had any trouble posting, and the motherboad comes with two socketed bios chips, plus automatic overclocking recovery that works flawlessly. Board has worked so well in testing, I'm moving it to my watercooling setup this weekend. Board layout is excellent. Must know what you're doing when working with this board, steep learning curve, but absolutly worth it for the performance you can achieve.

Cons: As others have stated, top piece of water cooling for northbridge is andonized aluminum, but it is coated with some kind of substance, so no aluminum is actually exposed to water, but just replace the nozzles with brass fittings, and the system should be free of galvanic corrosion. Audio card not great, but I use an after market card.
Manual could be a little more informative, but the information is out there on the forums.
The included northbridge fan sits to high mounted, couldn't get a Zalman 9700 mounted because of clearance issues, so I didn't use the northbridge fan while testing, but mb temp never got above 45 degrees
Will be a none issue when I change to water cooling.

Other Thoughts: Usually don't review products I buy here, but the negative comments on this board by some noobs prompted me to answer some comments.
Error code meanings on the board are easily found by going to Phoenix/Award bios web site, codes are in hexedecimal and the guides explain them (I've never had any errors), but researched just in case.
Usually you mount the motherboard, then add cards, so why do you need to get to the motherboard screw? Why do you need to get to the battery? Between the on board clear cmos button, it also has a cmos clear jumper, and the crashfree bios recovery. Using an after market sound card clears the area.
Most motherboard ram slot releases are blocked by graphics cards nowdays, at least in all my other motherboards, again no big deal.
People saying they have high tech knowledge when its easily apparent they don't understand much.

After Checking on both motherboards I have to say that the Black OPs is the best board of the 2.

 

[tipsycoma]

Thanks man, but I am well aware of that. You get what you pay for. Thing is I'm not sure if it's worth the extra hundred and something dollars. Thanks for your time btw.

 

[nemesi5]

Don't waste your money on an X48 board, I'd recommend the Gigabyte EP45-UD3P, the motherboard is perfect for 45NM's and its a P45 chipset meaning it supports crossfire, sadly x8, x8 . Still, it onlys 14$ more than the black-ops but there's a huge thread on the motherboard.

http://www.overclock.net/intel-mothe...ers-guide.html