which 780i motherboard

[widdyst]

I'm currently building a new system and am having trouble deciding which M Board to go for ! I live in uk and supply of the evga and xfx boards is zero I just cant get my hands on one. So boards currently available to me are asus p5nt - striker II and msi p7n diamond. Should I go with one of these or try and wait it out for an xfx or evga

[zakelwe]

I'm currently building a new system and am having trouble deciding which M Board to go for ! I live in uk and supply of the evga and xfx boards is zero I just cant get my hands on one. So boards currently available to me are asus p5nt - striker II and msi p7n diamond. Should I go with one of these or try and wait it out for an xfx or evga

I like my striker II, it's well geared for what I use it for which is table top benching. What will you be using it for and what cpu do you have?

Regards

Andy

[widdyst]

Well I dont have a cpu yet I'm probably going for e8400 although I havent ruled out q6600 go . I will primarily be using system for gaming so would like to start overclocking too

[zakelwe]

Well I dont have a cpu yet I'm probably going for e8400 although I havent ruled out q6600 go . I will primarily be using system for gaming so would like to start overclocking too

I'd go for an E8500 as it gives you the extra half multiplier so will allow you bigger headroom with the FSB which is lower on 780i motherboards than the equivalent Intel chipset. For this reason an E4600 is a good bet as well if you want to save money and spend it on the graphics cards. I assume you are going SLi of course?

Regards

Andy

[widdyst]

yes definitely going sli ! Have just read a good review on another forum for the msi board so might go for it

[Kosior]

You shouldn't nVIDIA provides fully manufactured mainboards to partners. The result is that they do not differ at all :P

[GAR]

eVGA, one reason because of their geat CS.

[Kyoshinra]

Widdy, like Kosior said, I think all the boards by the different manufacturers are the same thing, just maybe slightly different bios, or different colors. If you have a limited supply of certain "name" brand 780i, just pick from the ones you have available, they will be almost exactly the same as any other brands, minus colors, and possibly bios menu layout and options. Gl

[GAR]

Widdy, like Kosior said, I think all the boards by the different manufacturers are the same thing, just maybe slightly different bios, or different colors. If you have a limited supply of certain "name" brand 780i, just pick from the ones you have available, they will be almost exactly the same as any other brands, minus colors, and possibly bios menu layout and options. Gl

This is far from right, only evga and xfx use the nvidia reference design, asus, gigabyte, and msi use their own designs with their own parts, go read the thread about the evga 780i and the asus p5nt, then you can tell me if they are equal....p5nt sucks big time.

[GFORCE100]

This is far from right, only evga and xfx use the nvidia reference design, asus, gigabyte, and msi use their own designs with their own parts, go read the thread about the evga 780i and the asus p5nt, then you can tell me if they are equal....p5nt sucks big time.

This is correct, the part about Asustek, Gigabyte and MSI.

XFX and eVGA are just offices, they never have had and never plan to have any brain design power in them. They are just a front-end office with a pretty website with a bunch of employees you could fit in a medium sized room at best who are good when it comes to marketing. This is all. People think they are some big company but they aren't. They are just AIB vendors that get their hardware from Nvidia, stick on the cooler, sticker, and add a t-shirt lets say with their logo, then flog that off to the consumer. They haven't got a faintest clue about electronics design.

The only thing they can differ in is customer support but even this is really playing with the minds of consumers. It's all calculated into business sense. So what you get a lifetime 10 year warranty if a) its voided if you sell the card/board onto a 2nd buyer and b) you're bound to replace the card/board as you're enthusiast within a year anyway. Nvidia give them a 1 year warranty saying if our reference design product goes wrong, we'll exchange it for you. After the 1st year Nvidia say no, so these AIB's won't be so willing to provide the great customer service some people think they do (i.e. they won't be so happy about spending their own money fixing your warranty obligation). Statistics play a big role in why they say lifetime warranty on their packaging. How many people will come to them after say 9 years and say my card has failed, please give me a new one? Less than 1% in the best case scenario and under 5% in the worst case. Non-enthusiasts do not buy these branded products which just aids the statistics even further.

XFX, eVGA, BFG, it's all the same. If you have $5 million or less in you bank or are prepared to take a loan then you tooo could be an AIB. It's just about having the marketng mind to quickly shift what Nvidia sends you so your cash flow is good hence so you can a) steadily pay Nvidia and b) make a profit during the process.

It's a lightweight, not that demanding but somewhat risky business model. If you can do it right then you'll earn your pension just fine.

There are loads of companies in the world who parasite off other company intellectual achievements. Nvidia is just somewhat different to ATI, now AMD. Nvidia never wanted to sell its own branded products, they just want to be the manufacturer of GPU's and then wash their hands clean as marketing is a really messy, demanding and risky business (how do you make Joe Six Pack buy your product when it's identical to the competitions?). ATI years back instead chose to do what Nvidia does AND also sell their own branded graphics cards.

You will never ever find the likes of BFG, eVGA, XFX and what not selling truly their own products because a) they don't have the brain power in-house and b) making your own products which involves eletronically amending the reference design is a long and costly process. First design, then V&V over several cycles until you get it right. Unless you throw the right people and the right amount of money at it, by the time you do finish making your own product, the competition will have already moved on to the next generation product.

It should be noted that even the likes of Gigabyte and MSI (in a lesser sense Asus) buy from Nvidia in terms of graphics cards while Nvidia itself has the likes of Flextronics of ColorTech manufactuer their reference design cards. Foxconn is also known to do this. The big three: Asustek, Gigabyte, MSI due to their professional experience however choose to go by their own motherboard designs though but these too are based on the reference design to some extent at least.

[humeyboy]

The above is not entirely correct.

All the above Manu's made GPU's before the 8000 series and back then the cards were made by the Vendor not Nvidia's Contractors.

So they have plants and did print PCB's and add components to them, thats why MSI and Gainward could have Red PCB's on the Nvidia cards.

[GAR]

everyone has to follow reference design to some form.

[ppcli]

i have no use for evga 4 weeks without my 780i.they had it for almost 3 weeks before the rma was shipped.rma date was Jan 10th shipped it the next day and im still waiting to see it.

[GFORCE100]

The above is not entirely correct.

All the above Manu's made GPU's before the 8000 series and back then the cards were made by the Vendor not Nvidia's Contractors.

So they have plants and did print PCB's and add components to them, thats why MSI and Gainward could have Red PCB's on the Nvidia cards.

XFX, eVGA, BFG etc. are all fabless, no production capability at all.

If MSI wanted a red PCB they just had to setup an exclusive deal with Flextronics since the pigment is added during production of the PCB itself, and the PCB may not even be made by Flextronics in-house but rather by one of their sub-contractors just like car manufacturers bring in parts from various external companies. It's called outsourcing.

Even though MSI does have fabs, and the same for others, it's not always economical to reconfigure them to make graphics cards if they can just bulk buy them in OEM form and then brand them before selling them off, without all the issues of getting the manufacturing right (which can be also costly). With outsourcing you basically pass the blame should it go wrong on the sub-contractor so they handle the QA.

Do remember that also Gainward had red PCB's, in business if you order a certain number of something, say 50,000, the manufacturer will even customize it for you, either for free, or for a small fee. The bigger the order, the more headroom there is to improve on this.

Production is risky and expensive, why risk it if you can just pass it onto the next guy and instead concentrate on shifting the product out the door.

[OBR]

Striker 2 is best from the best ...

[javaman]

I am getting ready to rma my 2nd p5n-t. Not stable on default settings. Hard freezes and occasional BSOD.

[shawn1998]

I had an EVGA 780i until this morning (wouldn't let me change the vcore and cpu fsb voltages on a QX9650, but it would with a Q6600. Wierd.). I just installed the MSI P7N Diamond and am extremely thrilled with it. It runs cooler than the EVGA and actually works with the QX9650 that I just dumped a whole lot of cash on. This P7N is awesome.

[blackdem0n]

Striker 2 is best from the best ...

[\/\/ater (ooler]

Striker 2 is best from the best ...

any reason why?
does it overclock better than other 780is?

[OBR]

yeah ... as i said in another post ... i had many nF780i boards ... and Asus P5N-T is holly crap, refference board from eVGA/XFX/Foxconn are only from cheap capacitors and are flaky ... best mobo with nF780 is Striker 2 Formula ...

[seamumc]

This is correct, the part about Asustek, Gigabyte and MSI.

XFX and eVGA are just offices, they never have had and never plan to have any brain design power in them. They are just a front-end office with a pretty website with a bunch of employees you could fit in a medium sized room at best who are good when it comes to marketing. This is all. People think they are some big company but they aren't. They are just AIB vendors that get their hardware from Nvidia, stick on the cooler, sticker, and add a t-shirt lets say with their logo, then flog that off to the consumer. They haven't got a faintest clue about electronics design.

The only thing they can differ in is customer support but even this is really playing with the minds of consumers. It's all calculated into business sense. So what you get a lifetime 10 year warranty if a) its voided if you sell the card/board onto a 2nd buyer and b) you're bound to replace the card/board as you're enthusiast within a year anyway. Nvidia give them a 1 year warranty saying if our reference design product goes wrong, we'll exchange it for you. After the 1st year Nvidia say no, so these AIB's won't be so willing to provide the great customer service some people think they do (i.e. they won't be so happy about spending their own money fixing your warranty obligation). Statistics play a big role in why they say lifetime warranty on their packaging. How many people will come to them after say 9 years and say my card has failed, please give me a new one? Less than 1% in the best case scenario and under 5% in the worst case. Non-enthusiasts do not buy these branded products which just aids the statistics even further.

XFX, eVGA, BFG, it's all the same. If you have $5 million or less in you bank or are prepared to take a loan then you tooo could be an AIB. It's just about having the marketng mind to quickly shift what Nvidia sends you so your cash flow is good hence so you can a) steadily pay Nvidia and b) make a profit during the process.

It's a lightweight, not that demanding but somewhat risky business model. If you can do it right then you'll earn your pension just fine.

There are loads of companies in the world who parasite off other company intellectual achievements. Nvidia is just somewhat different to ATI, now AMD. Nvidia never wanted to sell its own branded products, they just want to be the manufacturer of GPU's and then wash their hands clean as marketing is a really messy, demanding and risky business (how do you make Joe Six Pack buy your product when it's identical to the competitions?). ATI years back instead chose to do what Nvidia does AND also sell their own branded graphics cards.

You will never ever find the likes of BFG, eVGA, XFX and what not selling truly their own products because a) they don't have the brain power in-house and b) making your own products which involves eletronically amending the reference design is a long and costly process. First design, then V&V over several cycles until you get it right. Unless you throw the right people and the right amount of money at it, by the time you do finish making your own product, the competition will have already moved on to the next generation product.

It should be noted that even the likes of Gigabyte and MSI (in a lesser sense Asus) buy from Nvidia in terms of graphics cards while Nvidia itself has the likes of Flextronics of ColorTech manufactuer their reference design cards. Foxconn is also known to do this. The big three: Asustek, Gigabyte, MSI due to their professional experience however choose to go by their own motherboard designs though but these too are based on the reference design to some extent at least.

Who is making EVGA's 780i FTW, which is definitely not a reference board.

[GFORCE100]

What's so not reference about it except the 8 instead of 6 SATA II ports as I can see?

An Nvidia reference design doesn't necessarily mean there is 1 version of it. The default version is 1.0 but eVGA have chosen to go for say 1.0a with very minor differences.

All the above companies including eVGA are at the sole mercy of what Nvidia allows them to sell and this will remain true until a) Nvidia changes their business model and gives more power to AIB's at the risk of damaging its brand image if they make a -up product with flaws and people associated it with the Nvidia chipsets and b) these companies start being more than just a nice website + office and get some electrical engineers under their belt, which is expensive to say the least.

...now the above usually works by protecting Nvidia's brand image but rarely do they get the reference design wrong. Look back at the 7900GTX's for example. The early batches had an overheating voltage regulator on the card's rear that caused various artifacts on screen. AIB's got the blame by unhappy consumers when in fact Nvidia rushed the product out the door too fast without longer V&V.

Nvidia also controls the pricing as it pleases so any potential profits to be made by AIB's depend on how much margin Nvidia allows them. Usually in business the more company A buys from company B, the better the unit price. AIB's such as these won't buy too much at once because a) they aren't big and are cash constrained + exhibit unsteady cash flow and b) it's much easier to sell cheap $100 graphics cards than it is to shift a load of $499 graphics cards where room for profit is considerably more than from the $100 graphics cards.

It really is a merry go round.

...so when push comes to shove, the marketing guys put their hat on and say, aha, lets try the oldest book in the game, i.e. take an existing product, pamper it here or there, give it a new name, new box with flashy vibrant images and announce it as a new special limited edition product. Why limited edition? Well to play on the minds of consumers of course, people think that because it's limited edition, availability will be constrained hence rush out to buy one straight away. eVGA of course gets your money quicker, the marketing folks get a small prize + pat on their back and off they go for a round of golf

Really, how more exciting is having 8x instead of 6x SATAII ports? 4x 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1's in RAID 0 is big & fast enough let alone the need for 8.

[OBR]

EVGA780 is pure reference board!