Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!

[Warsaw]

Depends on the resolution you are playing at and how powerful your cards are. PCI-E 2.0 8x will bottleneck two 7970s at 2560x1440, which is the primary reason I went with X79 rather than Z68. AnandTech actually ran an article on this recently, if you're interested.

[Kalub]

Well gents, this is it. Can I get the Brosef Blessing?

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Pu...umber=18788525

[Donut]

i recall looking around a month or two ago and finding ram thats about 10 bucks cheaper than what you have, and also supports 1600mhz. other than that, looks good to me. im not exactly an expert though.

[Warsaw]

His RAM is that price because CAS 7. You can easily get cheaper if you settle for CAS9, but AMD systems are affected by timing more so than Intel systems.

[JackalStomper]

Phenoms can't run anything faster than 1333 anyway. And thats just single channel. Dual channel they are underclocked to 1066 mhz

And about that, Warsaw is correct that the phenoms are comparable to the FX-4100's, or perhaps its better to say the FX-4100's are comparable to the Phenoms. But think of what it costs you, because the performance gap is not large. The phenoms have a higher price, higher TDP, inferior memory controller, lower clock, smaller L2/L3 cache, and run hotter than the FX-4100's.

Passmark Phenom 965

Passmark FX-4100

[Warsaw]

Single-threaded performance. I would take the Phenom every time. Of course, both can be overclocked to their physical limits, but the Phenom will do better when you don't stress the cores.

Actually, thinking about it, the FX-4100 is a virtual dual-core chip.

[Cortexian]

Depends on the resolution you are playing at and how powerful your cards are. PCI-E 2.0 8x will bottleneck two 7970s at 2560x1440, which is the primary reason I went with X79 rather than Z68. AnandTech actually ran an article on this recently, if you're interested.

5760x1200 - 6000x1200.

Welp~

How extreme is said bottleneck? Maybe when the 600 series cards come out it's time to ditch the triple-monitors for a Dell U3011.

[Warsaw]

Here you go. The graphs are all in PCI-E 3.0, but 3.0 x4 would be the same as 2.0 x8, and 3.0 x8 would be the same as 2.0 x16.

They conclude that PCI-E 2.0 x16 or PCI-E 3.0 x8 is necessary for something like the HD 7970. That means that it would also be desirable for the GTX 680.

I would say game on one, and use the others for work. But then again, you can slowly work at a triple U3011 setup as well.

[Cortexian]

I might have too keep an eye out for an Z68 board at the right price with similar specs to what I have now then.
What am I talking about, I keep forgetting that I'm planning to build a whole new rig in the next year or two.

[Warsaw]

If you plan on upgrading to Ivy Bridge and you don't already have a PCI-Express 3.0 capable Z68 board, you might as well just buy a Z77 board when Ivy comes out so you can take full advantage of all the new features. Personally, I'd jump on Sandy Bridge-E over Ivy, because there is just so much more that the X79 can offer over any Z68 or Z77 platform, and you don't have to wait for any of it. To boot, Ivy Bridge-E is a drop-in upgrade for LGA2011, so there's that to look forward to as well.