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GA-X58A-UD7 - Silent Pipe 2 + Board space

GA-X58A-UD7 - Silent Pipe 2 + Board space
« on: February 09, 2010, 08:51:34 am »
Hi all,

I'm a converter from Asus back to Gigabyte after experiencing an amazing amount of issues with the Striker II Extreme mobo. I'm hoping i never end up with a board that is so fidgety, unstable, and problematic. Anywayz, gripes aside, lets jump into my question...

So i have a GA-X58A-UD7 on the way in the mail.

I have a Creative X-Fi Titanium sound card which silly me have only just realised it almost certainly won't fit after i install the silent pipe. If i'm just air cooling and not planning on overclocking (i'm over it after the SEII issues i had), is the silent pipe manditory?

If i have to fit it, then i'm reduced to onboard sound as the card is more than 3 inches long on PCI-1 (those tiny top slots). Seems like a waste of money to lose what i consider to be such a nice card.

I'll be using a Asus GTX295 Graphics card, OCQ XMP memory and arctic cooler with velociraptor 10k HDD.

So.. question is, do you need the silent pipe if you're not watercooling and only air cooling? Case has two fans on the side but i keep the case open at the top on an angle to allow heat to escape from case much easier plus 12cm fan on the rear with PSU having its own large fan to help extract heat from the top as well. Fan on front of case died sadly and without destroying case, i'm unable to replace that one.

Also, i'd like to know if this board is stable. Right now, i'm guessing ANYTHING will be more stable than a SEII which out of the box is so unstable that you are forced to manually setup pretty much everything in the bios as auto options just simply don't work (even with QVL certified corsair memory).