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[InnerGoat]

That combo is the original bulldozer CPU which was very hot and power hungry. You're looking for the FX-8350 if you want AMD's 8 core. If your programs are highly multithreaded you should go with the 8350.

300 dollars for the GPU gets you a 3GB 7970 which is huge overkill for "light" gaming

here this might be of some help http://pcpartpicker.com/builds/?sort=rating#s=4&c=8

[Dwood]

That combo is the original bulldozer CPU which was very hot and power hungry. You're looking for the FX-8350 if you want AMD's 8 core. If your programs are highly multithreaded you should go with the 8350.

300 dollars for the GPU gets you a 3GB 7970 which is huge overkill for "light" gaming

here this might be of some help http://pcpartpicker.com/builds/?sort=rating#s=4&c=8

Well, by light gaming, I mean infrequent. I plan on playing games that are heavily taxing on a system, such as Crysis, etc. I just won't be doing it super often. It will also allow me to expand into the high resolutions when the Oculus Rift gets some upgrades and as games get more and more advanced. (We're rendering 2 separate 3d images/scenes at 1200x800 currently I believe)

Even then, though, I could do with a price drop i'm sure. I took a peek at that link... Here's my idea for the video card:
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/ati-video-card-100505610

it only has 512 MB memory, but that's the best I could see.. Let's see, what my old ATI Rad 4850's stats were... brb.

http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=FX-8350BOX

@Warsaw, the link's not broke, it was a joke.

I'm also very conscious of how bad the heat might turn out to be- I don't want to to do water cooling if I don't have to... This computer's going to have to make several moves as I'm going to college come Jan/Feb.

@ Warsaw, I love that Motherboard you sent! Good price. I love the idea of 4 PCI-E Slots, too!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128514
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=FX-8350BOX

Or this combo with the 7950:

http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=XFX-795NFC

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-vi...d7950dc23gd5v2

Good idea on the drop in GB Inner Goat, I'm looking at the Radeon Sapphire right now, I think this would be a fantastic fit: The biggest difference I see is the memory drop and price drop. Lost a good $100 bucks. I'm not against NVidia cards if they're price/perf competitive, though.

http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=AT-787GHZ2

[Warsaw]

When you say you will be playing demanding games infrequently, do you still want them at full-tilt settings? I would just go with the 7970 GHz Edition. Honestly, the extra overhead is worth it, and it's going to make a difference at higher resolutions. To put it in perspective, one of my 7970s (pre-GHz Edition, they are OG reference models) has a hard time running Metro 2033 at 2560x1440 completely smoothly. I bring this up because the Oculus Rift is supposed to be displaying two images at 1080p in stereoscopy. That is a lot of pixels to push. Even bringing it down to 1280x720 each, that's still the same amount of pixels as a 2560x1440 display.

Heat, well...you did want AMD. It's not going to be Intel cold, but if the CPU couldn't take the temperatures it generates, it wouldn't be on shelves and have great reviews. Also, I wouldn't be against liquid cooling. That closed-loop unit the FX-9370 comes with is the same one I have on my i7, and it does a remarkable job. It's also the same unit used by Corsair and others, I believe. Your idle temps will be higher than on air, but your load temps will be way better than the stock HSF that comes with the FX-8350. It's also really, really quiet.

[Dwood]

Heat, well...you did want AMD. It's not going to be Intel cold...

Okay, you made me want to google and see if there are any temperature benchmarks on heat- here's an article i've found on yahoo:

http://voices.yahoo.com/processor-te...l-3440928.html

Edit: So, that article didn't have any benchmarks. Let's take a peek at Tom's hardware.

I'm at minimum a month or two out from ordering the whole computer, so I'm not terribly concerned about doing the research to get best perf per dollar. If there's a big enough difference, I may just go with Intel.

[Dwood]

Double post: I've been looking, and i'm leaning towards the quad-core CPU's as opposed to the octo's, because I'm not really sure that the future is here yet to need 8 cores. In fact, wouldn't those 8 cores slow down older games designed for 1 core? or do you think the CPU's are just that fast so it doesn't matter?

[Donut]

I have never had my quad core slow down an older game designed for one core. If it actually does theoretically have an impact on the performance, the quad core is so damn fast anyway that you won't notice it. If it ever actually did have an issue, you can set a process to run on only certain cores. I think it's an option called "set affinity" when you right click on a process in windows task manager. We used to do that back in the day for sapien when dual cores were becomming a lot more common. I never had an issue there either, but I guess sapien didn't play nice with a lot of dual core processors.

[Zeph]

Double post: I've been looking, and i'm leaning towards the quad-core CPU's as opposed to the octo's, because I'm not really sure that the future is here yet to need 8 cores. In fact, wouldn't those 8 cores slow down older games designed for 1 core? or do you think the CPU's are just that fast so it doesn't matter?

you're already using multicore comfortably whether you realize it or not. The individual cores on an 8-core chip would far outperform a single core chip from years back. Even should you set affinity to a single core, your operating system still benefits from the remaining cores. As for your yahoo (lol yahoo news for computers) link, the only reason you need to worry about heat is if you've done your thermal paste wrong or you grossly overclock your hardware beyond what's stable for the tdp.

I know you said you were an AMD fanboy, but why not the following:
i5-3570k ~220
Asus Z77 mobo ~ 230 (bought an earlier version of this as a gimmick, but lol that heat shield works very well)
EVGA 760 ~ 320
4x4GB RAM ~ 160 (I know you said you wanted larger DIMMs, but I'm doing serious productivity and haven't used more than 12GB yet. You should at least make use of the extra channels for memory bandwidth.
Corsair PSU ~ 130 (overkill on the voltage, but has some of the nicest retail packaging I know of)

I assume you can canibalize everything else you need, such as hard drives, case, etc.
Just enters the lower end of your budget. Would handle the new branch of cryengine with rift support very well. If you're gonna bump anything up, bump the cpu up to an i7.
Anandtech doesn't have a bench on the 6350, but if you're comparing it against a 4300 I expect it to not be much of a difference. The i5 here does far better than the 4300.

The usb 3.0 and thunderbolt war isn't really a thing.
Thunderbolt was Apple's attempt at marketing a high speed standard proprietary to them so they could act like they had a leg up. It won't ever make a market share for itself, but publicly die quietly into an intel bus standard.
The usb design committee has already finalized specifications for a 10Gb/s standard for usb named 3.1 (I think). It's backwards compatible with all other USB and will start getting into the market in a year or two.
Dont buy into the hype, because neither clearly haven't started stocking the shelves of your local walmart.

[Dwood]

Holy moses Zeph is that a powerful GPU !

You actually have me interested in the heat cover, though. I'd be interested to looking into what else there is. I'm guessing that list is coming out to about ~1000.

I've actually looked on pcpartpicker which InnerGoat posted, and I can get a similar build for about $800: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1vsEK

I'm REALLY interested in the 4GB vs 2 GB, to see how big of a difference that could make. I mean, that could run crysis 3 twice holy freak. I think 2 of those monsters would be PLENTY, let alone one... I'm practically sold on the stats of that beast. Is there anything that has similar stats under $300? I saw some 3GB's for $250 I think, maybe xfiring or sli'ing them would be good.

I want this computer to be ready for the Oculus rift and other type of hmd's in the horizon (running them at 'full tilt'), and not likely purchasing a computer any time soon... I don't expect games to improve in quality exponentially, but rather I expect the devices that we use to get immensely better. /pcgaminsuperiority - it WILL win out eventually.

Yeah, I thought about it, and the earlier thing about usb 3.0 vs. thunderbolt isn't like hd-dvd vs blu-ray. I'm not even going to worry about it- taking a guess at usb 3.0 being the winner, as well, tbh.

[Zeph]

You shouldn't ever really be buying a gpu based solely on the RAM it has. A GTX 550ti with 8GB of RAM wouldn't beat a GTX 760 with 4GB. Nor would a 550 run twice as many games as once.....


The GTX 750 will probably be between 200-250 when it comes out, but I'm not sure when that is.
If you're looking at using the Rift seriously, I'd consider getting a 760 minimum with a 770 as safety for games that try to brute force the rendering.

[Dwood]

Sorry, I just glanced it over, didn't actually look at the specs in depth...