Matching Motherboards & Graphics Cards

[dawman]

I have never really had any issues with Graphics cards other than a sticky mouse and minor issues with excessive GUI's on the screen simultaneously.
Is there an advantage to having the Asus/Asus, Gigabyte/Gigabyte, MSI/MSI or eVGA/eVGA combos?
It seems to me the maufacturers could possibly have tested them together and since all of these guys slightly overclock their boards to give them a faster stock appearance, they might have these combos optimized?
I am looking at Gigabyte and also their 9600GT video card which is pretty cheap.

Anyone using such combos, or have in the past?

Ankyu......

[netguyjoel]

Nope...sorry, Intel & Matrox here...but that video card...you could buy two of them for half the money of a FireMV 2400, and still run quad monitors...provided you use 2 slots...not 1...makes me re-think about video for the Win7 i7 box this fall...huh

[valis]

No advantages at all. Graphics cards are mostly built to reference standards, overclocked parts are done via binning ram & gpu chips based on speed testing (validation) to differentiate parts from some vendors (XfX, eVGA, BFG etc). A handful of vendors might change the engineering of the cards a bit more (custom cooling, alter the layout of the pcb, change power supply) or even use a different layout altogether in a handful of cases but most stick to reference designs. In any case any of these changes wouldn't yield improved compatibility for a mobo from the same vendor...

If you're not concerned with gaming or video playback (video codec support in the gpu) then much of the features that differentiate higher tiered cards will be irrelevant to you.