My rig: Antec Nine Hundred Coolermaster extremepower 550w Pentium Dual-Core E2160 Zalman CNPS7700-Alcu 4GB Transcend DDR2-800 Asrock 4CoreDual-Sata2 Galaxy 9600GT 512MB 2x Sata DVD Burners (LG and Liteon) Samsung 500GB Hard Drive (sata2) 2 PCI Cards I'm deciding on a new motherboard, I will very soon get a second 9600GT. Asus P5N-D: 2 is suitable number of SLI slots, and this mean more room for PCI and PCI-ex1 slots, 9600GTs only support 2-way sli. Not the best overclocking results and 24-pin connection is in a retarded position. MSI P7N: This is a 3-way sli 750i board, 1 x16 slot and 2 x8 slots, but I will never use the 3rd slot because 9600GT's only support 2-way SLI. Excellent cooling and overclocking results, great layout, but I will have no empty pci slots for future things, although I will probably be able to put a x1 card in the x8 slot. Cheapest out of the three. Evga 750i: Don't really know much about this board, but it's the most expensive out of the three. I'm trying to save money here.
I think Asus is crap stay away lots of problems with their boards since they moved their production to china. MSI: wouldn't really know never had their brand of board before. Evga:I had their 680i it was an excellent motherboard, really good for overclocking also had 2x pci express x16 slots only first gen sli. but in the end i took it to far overclocked my Q6600 to 3.8ghz air cooled and did a stupid mistake of not running prime95 :doh:. so in the end my board malfunctioned and had to throw it away only thing it probably would of needed was a vcore increase :doh: couldnt rma it cuz it was off ebay. so out the 3 personally I would choose Evga but if you plan on overclockin make sure you run prime95
I have the P5N-D and run 9600gt in SLI, I have also overclocked my e8200 to 3.4ghz. For the board has been working absoloutly fine since I got it. But the vdroop when overclocking is larger than I would expect it to be, and I have an unidentified piece of hardware shown in device manager on my pci slot(and there is nothing connected there).
Hi I also have an ASUS P5N-D. I had been using it fine for about 6 months now till I had a problem with the ethernet port. It just went dead. So I had to install a separate NIC card. Since 9600GT is a single slot card, it would fit quite nicely in the motherboard. However, in the future if you plan on getting a higher end card may GTX 280 which uses double slots, DO NOT buy the ASUS as the PCI-E slots are reallly close. It might cause overheating. I dont know much about MSI or EVGA but I think both boards are quite good compared to the ASUS. Ive read in some articles that MSI is a very stable board and EVGA is good for overclocking. Cheers.
I got my new motherboard yesterday, Asus P5N-D. I feel like my computer is now perfect The 4GB DDR2 was $50au and the Asus P5N-D was $120au. And I got my 1.8ghz E2160 to reach 3.2ghz, and under load the temperature is 44C. I'll probably add another 9600GT next.
