I'd like to purchase a motherboard to match up with an i7 2600K cpu that I have and the Z68-GD80 is the board I'm leaning towards but the information on Crossfire is a little confusing at the moment. I already have a pair of MSI R6970 Lightning Radeon HD 6970 2GB 256-bit video cards. Will one card only take advantage of the x16 speed and the second automatically default to x8 or if I understand right that both cards can be run as x16 but that shuts down some of the USB connections and some of the other slots on the board. I need at least one PCI-E 1 slot for my sound card which is a HT Omega eClaro. I've tried searching the internet on the subject but haven't come up with any solid information for this type of setup. I'll be using Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit version loaded on an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB drive to boot from and I have a 240GB G.SKILL Pro Series SATA II SSD for my work apps and a 750 GB WD Black edition to install my games on. I also have a USB 3.0 2TB WD external HD to back my files up on. As for RAM I have G.SKILL Ripjaws X + Turbulence II Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 time two for a total of 8GB with a pair of optical drives powered by an 850W Corsair PSU. If you need anymore info just ask.
Any information sure would be welcome so I can get this rig up and running.
Nope. Not enough PCI-E lanes to run two cards at 16X. They will both reduce to the 8X bandwidth. However, the performance hit from 16X to 8X is not a very significant amount. 'IF' you populate the third PCI-E 16X slot with an add-in card, you then lose some functionality of other features, both PCI slots for sure. At the MSI Global Website, the downloadable pdf manual is available, along with some other guides & descriptions of features.
Thanks HU16E after doing more digging I see that just about every board with the Z68 chip-set has the same limitations. Even many of the 67's are the same way. I should be okay then since the only add in card I plan on using is my sound card and that should work just fine in a PCI-E 1 slot.
Several years ago I built a mess of AMD Athlon systems all of which were put on MSI boards and every single one of them are still running today. I had switched to another manufacturer but after my first build with them that went fine I've had nothing but trouble with them since. After some long nights reading every review I could find I decided to come back to MSI. My parents have asked me to build them an AMD based system and from what I've seen MSI boards are just as good as any other though I talked them into holding off until Bulldozer comes out.
