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Just finished the last notch in a Sandy Bridge build:
I really do love the Sandy Bridge implementation of Turbo clocks. I'm a huge, huge Photoshop user (as might be indicated by my arrangement of spend on memory and drives). If anyone has used CS5 on an AMD platform, watching the CPU usage was INFURIATING. A lot of functions were multi-threaded, sure, but with so many (zoom being the most annoying), you'd see one core absolutely slammed...and everything else idling. That the Intel chips can clock one core up during situations like that...delicious!
And I gotta say - as convenient as it was having a tiny shoebox sitting on the desk, having a proper tower again is awesome for the possible arrangements of drives, expansion cards (already eying PhysX cards), CPU cooling, etc.
And while it's been a while since I've had a Biostar board...the tweaking options in the BIOS on this one are really very nice. Port arrangement (SATA, etc) is sensible and easy to route around a case. No problem putting additional RAM in, even with an aftermarket CPU HSF. Nice build.
As much as an OCZ fan as I've been (witness the SSDs), I went with G.Skill for memory, as OCZ just didn't have what I needed, there. And I'm actually pretty happy with that - with four sticks, I'm still managing 1T at DDR3-1600. Prime95 stable for hours, so....good!
The whole thing just feels...smooth. Fast. Very happy!
- Core i5-2400 (clocked to 3.8ghz/3.7ghz/3.6ghz/3.5ghz for 1 through 4 cores, respectively)
- Biostar TP67B+ Intel P67 motherboard
- 16gb G. Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-1600 (at CL9-9-9-24, 1T!!)
- AMD Radeon HD 5770 (to be upgraded this fall to whatever is the best in the $150-$200 range...for Skyrim)
- Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty PCI-E
- Corsair CX500 PSU
- OCZ Vertex 2 90gb (system drive)
- OCZ Vertex 2 60gb (Photoshop scratch disk)
- OCZ Vertex Turbo 30gb (system swapfile)
- Western Digital Caviar 'Black' 1.5gb (games and downloads)
- Western Digital Caviar 'Black' 640gb (encrypted...documents, accounting, work, photos and such)
- All in an Antec 300-series case
I really do love the Sandy Bridge implementation of Turbo clocks. I'm a huge, huge Photoshop user (as might be indicated by my arrangement of spend on memory and drives). If anyone has used CS5 on an AMD platform, watching the CPU usage was INFURIATING. A lot of functions were multi-threaded, sure, but with so many (zoom being the most annoying), you'd see one core absolutely slammed...and everything else idling. That the Intel chips can clock one core up during situations like that...delicious!
And I gotta say - as convenient as it was having a tiny shoebox sitting on the desk, having a proper tower again is awesome for the possible arrangements of drives, expansion cards (already eying PhysX cards), CPU cooling, etc.
And while it's been a while since I've had a Biostar board...the tweaking options in the BIOS on this one are really very nice. Port arrangement (SATA, etc) is sensible and easy to route around a case. No problem putting additional RAM in, even with an aftermarket CPU HSF. Nice build.
As much as an OCZ fan as I've been (witness the SSDs), I went with G.Skill for memory, as OCZ just didn't have what I needed, there. And I'm actually pretty happy with that - with four sticks, I'm still managing 1T at DDR3-1600. Prime95 stable for hours, so....good!
The whole thing just feels...smooth. Fast. Very happy!