Motherboard Inquiry for NLE

[Trent Briles]

I'm conducting research on the best motherboard for NLE with anticipation of building the editor sometime this spring. I read the recommendation from the 'Video Guys' and other sites who touts the ASUS Brand (P6X58 and P9X79 ) however the reviews for ASUS is troubling. I have also looked into Gigabyte and they have mixed reviews.

I do understand the mobo is not as important as the other specs, but it's the core and to me the opinions of other builders are important. I would like to solicit the forum for suggestions on the best motherboard for my editor.

Processor choices: Either Intel Core i7 3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz or Intel i7-980 Hex Core.

Thanks much!

[Harm Millaard]

i7-3930K no doubt.

Gigabyte has serious problems with the quality of the capacitors on a whole range of X79 motherboards and they came out with all kinds of BIOS updates to minimize the risks of burned out boards.

What kind of rumors are you talking about with Asus?

[Battle Vaughan]

While Harm is the undisputed guru and I defer to him on all things computational, the Intel DX79SI board looks like it might be a viable option. It is an LGA2011 board and so supports the i7-3930k processor.

In side-by-side tests it scored slightly slower in some aspects than Asus and GB boards, but hair-splittingly so. If firewire is a factor, as it still is to some of us, it has two FW ports while the competition has one (either asus or gb, I forget, has the via fw chip, which is not particularly well received).

Perhaps worth a look, at any event.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Battle Vaughan

While Harm is the undisputed guru and I defer to him on all things computational, the Intel DX79SI board looks like it might be a viable option. It is an LGA2011 board and so supports the i7-3930k processor.

The only problem with Intel-branded motherboards is that they are less than optimal for a video editing system, despite the high-quality components. Specifically, the Intel-branded motherboards are less stable at the higher levels of overclocking that most other brands of motherboards can easily handle - not because of their lesser-quality components per se, but because the Intel BIOSes are missing a few critical CPU and memory adjustments that are required to achieve a high stable overclock. And as you can see from the PPBM5 results list, most of the systems in the top 100 (out of the over 670 systems on the list) are heavily overclocked.

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

What kind of rumors are you talking about with Asus?

Actually, Asus has had a higher-than-average rate of quality control issues (even after its relatively large market share is factored in) with its motherboards in the last year - especially its P67 mobos. On my main system's P8P67 PRO v3.0, installing anything into the top PCI-e x1 slot will prevent the system from even POSTing at all if the i7-2600K CPU is set to be overclocked past 3.9GHz. And since the other PCI-e x1 slot is completely blocked by a graphics card with a double-slot GPU cooler, the P8P67 PRO's design forces me to use the x16-length/x4-electrical slot (which runs at x1 by default) or the other x16 slot (which will drop the main x16 slot's bandwidth to x8) for any PCI-e add-in cards.