First Time Builder (Mainstream or Enthusiast?)

[jleon088]

Hello wonderful PCMech users,

I am looking to invest as much as $3,000 into a gaming PC (Crysis 2-3, Metro, GW2). I have never owned an enthusiast platform based on Intel extreme processors. I need to know if Sandy Bridge-E is worth it in August 2012. Are enthusiast builds more future proof and for how long? Will there be another LGA 2011 CPU later on? Maybe I should 1) consider Ivy Bridge i7 or 2) wait a year for Intel's tock releases (a new extreme CPU). Please let me know your thoughts and if the following build works =) :

Newegg.com - Once You Know, You Newegg

Thanks so much,

jleon088

[glc]

Overkill overkill overkill. It's your money but you can build a great gamer for considerably less than that. All you need is mainstream.

[jdeb]

I agree

[David M]

If you are looking for ways to spend your money I would suggest a three monitor system with two high end graphics cards and either an excellent sound system or an excellent pair of headphones, or both. You just have to experience gaming on three monitors to understand why it is so excellent but you will need the graphics horsepower to drive all those pixels. Once you game on three monitors you never want to go back. Its like wearing horse blinders on your head where all you can see is straight ahead.

That will get you up to $3000 real fast. I would not waste it on the fastest CPU that money will buy. With a high end gamer, the CPU is not where you will find the bottleneck, that is with your graphics card and the number of graphics lanes available if you have multiple cards and multiple monitors.

If you want to wait, the 2011 boards will have up to 40 lanes of PCI-e 3.0. No bottleneck there even with 2 dual GPU cards. I wouldn't race out to buy the first day it is available. There are quite often problems with new releases like this. Give it a couple months for the demand to drop, the supply to catch up and if there is a problem to see how long it is going to take to get a fix.

[Bronxbomber90]

Originally Posted by David M If you are looking for ways to spend your money I would suggest a three monitor system with two high end graphics cards and either an excellent sound system or an excellent pair of headphones, or both. You just have to experience gaming on three monitors to understand why it is so excellent but you will need the graphics horsepower to drive all those pixels. That will get you up to $3000 real fast. I would not waste it on the fastest CPU that money will buy. With a high end gamer, the CPU is not where you will find the bottleneck, that is with your graphics card and the number of graphics lanes available if you have multiple cards and multiple monitors. If you want to wait, the 2011 boards will have up to 40 lanes of PCI-e 3.0. No bottleneck there even with 2 dual GPU cards.

The 2011 boards??? Wait we are on 2012

[glc]

Socket 2011...........

The X79 chipset is not where it's at - like all other Intel X-series chipsets, it's fussy and picky and can be difficult to make stable.

If I were building a gamer right now, I'd go 1155, Ivy Bridge on Z77.

[jdeb]

Originally Posted by glc Socket 2011........... The X79 chipset is not where it's at - like all other Intel X-series chipsets, it's fussy and picky and can be difficult to make stable. If I were building a gamer right now, I'd go 1155, Ivy Bridge on Z77.

I agree. the X79 is much in the same as the X58. I have been playing around with two of them so I at least know how to fix them when they come in. I already destroyed the BIOSTAR TPOWER X79. The Asus Sabertooth I am testing is running perfect. To much fussing for quad channel memory in my opinion. It is not even stable out of the gate so buyer beware.

[David M]

Yup, enthusiast means hard for a newbee and even for experts at times.

[jdeb]

Originally Posted by David M Yup, enthusiast means hard for a newbee and even for experts at times.

I purposely took it to the limits just to get a feel for how easy it was to fry with high voltages, it was not very hard. Biostar is going to RMA it even after I called them and was totally honest.

There are no automatic overclocking features in the BIOS with this board. You have to overclock using the multiplier. The stability was greatly affected at 4.5Ghz (maybe 4.6) and the multiplier at x45. It blew up when I pushed the voltages past 1.5v . I knew it was going to happen. The board also lacks loadline calibration.

The interesting thing with these boards are the weird anomalies or micro screen flashing using certain memory. The most stable was again with the Corsair Vengeance 1.5V. I don't know for sure but these boards beg to be tweaked, it's as if the manufactures just throw them together for you to try and figure them out. I also bought a ASRock and a MSI but both failed to boot and went back. Actually the ASRock was damaged after a careful inspection.