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

[Cortexian]

Well I've been thinking of building a new complete rig for a few reasons:
• My mid-tower is way to cramped for my liking.
• I want to start watercooling things, again more space for those components and tubing is a must.
• I want to retire this system to a HTPC since it has all the HDD's for storage (which makes it really heavy, which makes it hard to LAN with, etc).

That's why I'm probably going to spend some quality coin on a LAN-friendly full-tower, or at least as LAN-friendly as full-towers come. There may be modding involved so that it has some ultra-durable hooks that I can attach a shoulder harness to or something.

But yeah, I'm in need of a new PC to make everything in the house work like I want it to.

[Warsaw]

Lol, LAN-friendly full tower...my PC is 60 pounds, and I only have one hard drive. If you want LAN-friendly, don't buy a Fractal Design case because these things are heavy.

But yeah, definitely go X79. It has all the upgrade potential you'll need for likely the next 4 years, barring some major revolution in CPU architectures and software design. Also, it's really not any more expensive than Z68 at this point; there is literally no reason not to use X79. $250 will get you a great board on either platform, and the i7-3820 is about the same price as the i7 2600K.

[Cortexian]

Well I just upgraded to P67, so I won't do anything for the next year at least. This thing is still pretty much brand new, and I built it as a hold-over until I could build my "dream system". My mid-tower is approaching 70lbs now to give you an idea, and I've got a lot of shit out of the case for better airflow and cable management.

If I were to build my "dream system" right now I would def go X79 though, mostly just for some quad-channel memory and PCI-E 3.0. Gonna wait and see what Q4 2012 brings.

[Kalub]

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

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.

Well, I'm trying get a processor/motherboard that can survive in my machine for at least two years without an upgrade. I think I might switch to an i5 in the build list, and bite the bullet to get more bang for the buck.

[Warsaw]

That would be ideal. While you're at it, you might want to consider either an HD 7850 or HD 7870. They just came out, but they offer 90% of the performance of a GTX580 (sometimes 100%) for half the price and the overclocking headroom on them is obscene; they can surpass an HD 7950 if you push them to 1.2GHz core and 1.375 GHz VRAM, which is easy to do because you don't even have to overvolt.

The thing to remember is that Ivy Bridge is supposed to come out in either April or May last I heard; buying a Sandy Bridge CPU right now is tantamount to upgrade suicide. I don't know when Kepler is to be released, but you won't be seeing any wallet-friendly parts until at least two months after the GTX 680's release anyways and that's too long.

E: And yeah, I didn't blow $3000 on a new rig just so I could have to upgrade it in two years. Though I can already see the CPU bottlenecking my graphics in BF3, I'll have to fix that when IVB-E comes out. It's the physics, I tell you. Anything AMD outside of an FX-8120 or 8150 will not stand up for two years; the 8120+ only work if you overclock them out the ass to reach parity with the i7 920, but then you need some hard-core power and cooling and you have only achieved the performance of almost two Intel generations ago.

EE: That's actually true for the Black Box Phenom II's as well. You'll need to OC them to keep up over time, because they also don't match even the i3 line at times, let alone the i5s and i7s. Phenoms are all around better than Bulldozers though unless most of what you do is heavily threaded. If that's the case, then definitely buy an FX chip.

[Kalub]

That's quite interesting. The more I think about it... the more I'll probably just wait for the IvyBridge to come out so prices may drop a little on the SandyBridge. I don't need the latest or greatest, I just like longevity of the components. I spoke to my NCO and he said to grab an AMD instead of the i5, but... yea... I'm thinking he's a bit behind the curve.

I'll keep shopping around. Thanks for the help.

[JackalStomper]

If you put a lot of emphasis on budget when speaking with him, then he pointed you in the right direction. AMD has a superior Price/Performance ratio on most of their CPU's.

As for ivy making sandy prices drop? Unlikely, Intel quite enjoys their inflated prices. Hell the bloomfield CPU's have steadily raised in price since their release 5 years ago.

[Cortexian]

If you put a lot of emphasis on budget when speaking with him, then he pointed you in the right direction. AMD has a superior Price/Performance ratio on most of their CPU's.

As for ivy making sandy prices drop? Unlikely, Intel quite enjoys their inflated prices. Hell the bloomfield CPU's have steadily raised in price since their release 5 years ago.

There's a difference between old hardware prices going up due to lack of supply and inflation, and relatively new hardware with plenty of stock being discounted.

The SB prices will go down when IB comes out, maybe not by a lot but they will.

[Warsaw]

If you put a lot of emphasis on budget when speaking with him, then he pointed you in the right direction. AMD has a superior Price/Performance ratio on most of their CPU's.

As for ivy making sandy prices drop? Unlikely, Intel quite enjoys their inflated prices. Hell the bloomfield CPU's have steadily raised in price since their release 5 years ago.

AMD is no longer the price/performance king. If you go to a website such as Tom's Hardware and look at all of the recommended CPUs for each price point, they are all Intel now. It used to be all AMD up to $200, so no, they aren't being biased.

[InnerGoat]

Tom's put up GTX 680 benchmarks a few days early and quickly removed them, but someone saved them all lolol

http://imgur.com/a/RCDqK#44