Should be a simple question, as im only planning running diablo 3 i dont need sli. AMD motherboards dont come with sli cables anyway and thats what im used to building. SO do I need* a sli bridge to run nvidia cards on a amd board or can I run them independently of each other which is the requirement of gpugrid anyways. Thanks Ben

everything i read says that theres a performance drop, yet I dont think they take into account that people will be crunching on these cards independently, do you see much performance decrease? or are you unsure?

Amd is slower than Intel.chips, so the performance is CPU related I would assume.

well im deducting that since sli bridge is communication between cards, that independent usage as you say works so without the communication between there will be minimal performance issues. just a guess. Thats my view, i read that there could be 30% drop in performance, somewhere recently, that im taking out of context. I think they meant sli. Thats the biggest performance drop ive seen of even a 4x pci-e channel. So if you happen to know I would still appreciate the advice

well i would like to recommend GA-990FXA-UD7 from buy.com I already have a 8150 gigabyte board and it works like a charm.

Actually its the pcie issue why i got the sabertooth x79, since boards that had 4 would have 2 at 16 but once you got to 3 it would be 16, 8, 8. Since the sabertooth only has 3, its locked at 16, 16,8.

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3880#sp

that link says that 2 at 16x and 2 at 8x and 2 at 4x but yeah, i dont know of any other board really with that kinda performance for price. Also I might end up buying windows 7, and just keep the knowledge, cause i have alot to pay for this month anyway, diffence of about 100 dollars, plus the downclocking is killing my current 570. But yea I can vouch for how insanely easy and compatible the 8 core 8150 is with gigabyte.

Agreed. Especially considering this graph..

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/10/12/amd-fx-8150-review/10

Great hobby. Expensive, but great.

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3880#sp

... i dont know of any other board really with that kinda performance ...

As many of user already said, you can use two nvidia cards as long as the motherboard has two PCI-E connectors. Today I put the GTX 470 graphics card to assist the GTX 260 graphics cards. Gpugrid.net detect cards wrong, claiming that i have two GTX 470 graphics cards in one machine. I do not worry about it.