Best 1156 motherboard for 3x GPU's

[sparx1981]

Hi guys,

I currently have an i7 870 @ 4.09ghz on a 1156 motherboard. The board I currently have is a P7P55De-Pro. This works fine and I have no complaints. I have a child on the way so I'm looking for a cheap way of upgrading in future. Does anyone know of a 1156 motherboard that allows for 3 or 4 graphics PCI slots? I know on the new socket 2011 boards there are some that allow four slots for GPU's.

I'm going to get two 7970's and from the benchmarks and reviews I think that the CPU is fine. Especially with the higher resolutions in eyefinity. I would like the option of adding a 3rd 7970 or 7990 potentially in future or perhaps an nvidia card dedicated for physx.

Thanks,

[sparx1981]

By the way, I know that perhaps a sandybridge board and chip may give better bandwidth but that would mean investing in a board and chip at extra expense. Also the improvement in chip speed would be negligable so I dont really want to invest much in that direction.

I have found an a couple of EVGA boards here but not sure if they are the best option for 3 way crossfire.

http://www.evga.com/articles/00502/P55_spec.pdf

[Gilly]

I am not sure what you are planning on running for settings, but you are not going to need 3 7970s. IMO by the time you may need that power, a single 9970 will perform better than the crossfire setup. If you really must upgrade to a board with 3 slots, bear in mind that the 1156 and 1155 system CPU's control the 2 PCI-e express lanes directly for the graphics cards, at the moment you only get PCi-e spec 2.1 x16 slot, or 2x 8 slots, the extra bandwidth from the 3d slot has to come from the SATA/ USB bus, so you will lose performance overall if you run with 3 cards with any motherboard.

As you said, the 1366 and 2011 systems have more pcie lanes, so that isn't a problem with them, although they cost quite a bit more :)