[cornflakes4u]

Hello good people. I'm very satisfied with the CPU you guys recommended to me a while back but now I'm back for some more recommendations.

I'm on the search for a new motherboard, CPU and RAM. Maybe a small SSD disk as well. My budget is €1000 ($1315, £831). I'll locate the parts in a web-shop based in my country, so feel free to find part s from any site.

Edit: I need at least 8GB of RAM as I'm using several programs which benefits from larger amounts of RAM.

This post has been edited by cornflakes4u on Sunday, Feb 5 2012, 09:19

[yojo2]

I'd wait few months till Ivy Bridge CPUs are released.

Or, if you have to upgrade right avay, get i7-2600k, ASRock P67 Extreme4 Gen3 or ASUS P67 Sabertooth mobo, and a Crucial M4 64/128GB SSD. As for the RAM - any 1600MHz CL9 2x4Gb will do, though avoid RAM with large heatsinks.

[cornflakes4u]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I forgot to mention that I'm most likely going to overclock the CPU. Are those motherboards overclocking-friendly? I'm asking because my current one is not.

I'll wait until next month to see if any release dates are set for the new CPU's.

[yojo2]

Sure, all of these mobos have very good OC capabilities.

I'm pretty sure that Ivy Bridge are scheduled to be released by the start of April.

[cornflakes4u]

Great! I think I'll just go for Sandy Bridge as I'm not very patient and after reading a thread about the new chips it seems the difference wont be that big (I could be wrong).

Is there any significant difference between a i7-2600k and i7-2700k? By the looks of it the latter has 100MHz more for an additional €20. Would that just be a waste of money as I'm going to overclock it anyway?

With the parts you recommended (ASUS Sabertooth P67 & Corsair Dominator DHX DDR3 1600MHz 12GB) I still have about €130 to spend. Is there anything I should add?

Thanks again for your quick reply!

[yojo2]

If you're an overclocker, then there is absolutely no point in paying those €20 extra.

And another thing - I'd get 16GBs or 8GBs of RAM. 12GBs (I suppose it's a 3x4GB set) will work in Single Channel mode. it's not a big deal, but still.

[cornflakes4u]

I see. You're right, it's 3x4GB. I will go for 16GB instead then. Thanks a ton for your assistance! *Sends tons of e-cookies your way*

[Wolf68k]

Not much since in waiting for Ivy Bridge anyway. Other than a slight CPU performance increase and supporting DDR3 1600 the biggest difference between Sandy and Ivy is that the GPU gets a big upgrade.

What programs are you running that need a lot of RAM?
If you're doing something that will be CPU intensive, more than just gaming, so I mean serious CPU intensive then you might want to look at the Socket2011 line. For gaming they are not better than the Socket 1155, however for doing serious CPU processing like encoding videos, working with 3D models, compressing large files and so on the 2011 is a much better chip. Although it is more expensive and as it is now it's a small niche group. You know about the Core2Duo/Quad and there was the Extreme versions of those. The 2011 is the Extreme version of the 1155.

[cornflakes4u]

Thanks for that info. Mainly Vegas Pro 11 would benefit with a lot of RAM. I do encode videos and such indeed, however the computer is mainly for gaming so I'll stick with Socket 1155.

QUOTE

Other than a slight CPU performance increase and supporting DDR3 1600 the biggest difference between Sandy and Ivy is that the GPU gets a big upgrade

Does this mean that the i7-2600k does not support DDR3 1600 at all?

[Wolf68k]

Not natively. Basically that means when you put DDR3 1600 stick in and let the mobo auto detect the settings it'll use 1333, which is fine no big deal. But if you want it to run at that speed you'll have to "overclock" it in the BIOS.

[cornflakes4u]

Thanks for the explanation. I plan on overclocking the CPU so I suppose it's no big deal that it doesn't support it natively.

[Wolf68k]

The differences between 1333 and 1600 really only show up in benchmarks. As a gamer the most you might see is ever so slightly faster load times. For encoding video you might see, just a guess, around 5 secs faster encoding times.

[cornflakes4u]

That's good to know. After reading through some articles and forum posts about the matter I've come to the conclusion that getting 1600MHz RAM is better considering I'm planning to overclock. And those estimated slightly faster loading times and faster encoding times seals the deal for me.

[SyphonPayne]

Every suggestion by yojo and Wolf68k has been spot-on. Go with what they are telling you, you won't regret it. 2600K is a BIG upgrade from the Q9550, and you'll be at the top of the gaming charts with it for at least another 2-3 years. As far as encoding and stuff, again, HUGE upgrade from the Q9550.

As for RAM, get 1600MHz RAM at CAS 8 or 9. 2600K fully supports 1600MHz RAM, you'll just have to manually set it. 1600MHz is by far the sweet spot as far as price/performance for the 2600K.

[cornflakes4u]

Thanks for the input. Can't wait to get the new parts and test how beast it is and also to see how far I can overclock the CPU.

[SyphonPayne]

Here's my specs .

This post has been edited by SyphonPayne on Monday, Feb 6 2012, 07:28

[cornflakes4u]

POWERFUL! Out of curiosity; how well does GTA IV run on your system? (I'm assuming it runs best with SLI disabled.)

[Slamman]

Intel has designed their last two motherboard chipsets to support caching between HDD and SDD while the computer is running tasks, the benefit is that you can make one drive from a smaller, more affordable SDD tied to a traditional HDD using the method.

As noted in another thread, new OS from MS also offer the option to use a new, empty USB drive as additional memory (dynamic in nature) as you're computing, you can still use those thumb drives to store in the standard method, using Windows to store data to a USB drive doesn't permanently change it's attributes, which I find VERY nice, my Acer does it

[SyphonPayne]

QUOTE (cornflakes4u @ Monday, Feb 6 2012, 03:29)

POWERFUL! Out of curiosity; how well does GTA IV run on your system? (I'm assuming it runs best with SLI disabled.)

It performs very well. I previously had a Q6600 @ 3.2GHz, with a single GTX 560 Ti. It ran at about 35 FPS on average. I upgraded to the 2600K, immediately cranked it to 4.3GHz, tested in Prime95 etc., then ran GTA IV. 60FPS average with Vsync on! I'm talking about in the actual game too, not that useless "benchmark." GTA IV actually runs "OK" with SLI enabled. No extra performance, but I do have it enabled.

Here's a vid of Crysis maxed out on my rig, which definitely benefits from SLI:

[Slamman]

I have been pouring over several PC magazines as I brought up, covering a number of years, and the other night an article on SLI issues with nVidia shows their own dialog popup, if you have one card, and you go to SLi, will the same driver then add SLI in your device manager for required options tooled around dual cards? I'd be new to this, so it's of interest.

CERTAIN members don't like YouTube as a reference, not naming names, but I saw some SLI examples where they claim you CAN max out GTA IV on such setups, I'm really hoping to see improvements in mine, once I have a board with more then one PCIe slot
I know how behind the times I am, but I simply cannot afford hundreds in PC parts, since I'm trying to resuscitate my PS3 gaming as well

This post has been edited by Slamman on Monday, Feb 6 2012, 21:39