Unsure of what/any upgrades: Help with CPU/Mobo advice?

OniExpress

OniExpress

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 11, 2009
Messages
179
As the title (clumsily) states, I'm thinking of upgrading my core pc (Asus M4A78T-E and Phenom II 1090T). Not for any major reasons; by and large it does what I need it to do. I'm especially pleased with the cpu, but if I have one particular fault with the combo it's that the mobo has no sata 6gb/s ports at all. For that matter, it doesn't do dual x16/x16.

My problem is that I can't really find anything that would be a significant upgrade. This motherboard is an improvement, but it's basically just spending $240 to be able to spend even more money on stuff to punk into it. I'm especially hesitant to put significant money into graphics cards when 3.0 is out of my reach unless I completely jump over to Intel.

My primary needs?

1. Ram. Lots of ram, and fast at that. I'd like to have the new pc running at least 16gb.
2. Storage. I'd prefer 6-7 internal Sata 6gb/s (2 to raid ssd, 1 to keep backup of ssd os drive, 4 more to raid for programs/data), but at a bare minimum I could do with 4.
3. At least the option to run x16/x16 simultaneously.
4. S/PDIF optical mandatory. I don't know, is this uncommon still? I've never personally known anyone other than myself to use it.

That's basically my problem in a nutshell. Budget? For purpose of discussion, we'll say under $1000 for cpu/mobo, because if I had more than that I'd have a lot more headroom to upgrade into.

Anyone have any thoughts?
 
Seems like you would benefit most from jumping to the X79 platform and plugging in a nice 3830 or 3930. $1000 for the combo does give you quite a bit of leeway for what you can upgrade to and I would personally do the jump if it were me and not even look at anything like the Z77 or upgrading the AMD motherboard.

If you want to stay with AMD, however, you'll lose out on PCIe 3.0. Although, as it is, current cards aren't completely saturating PCIe 2.0 so its not a big deal yet and you will most certainly be able to save a majority of that money for a future upgrade. You'll also get those SATA6 ports, RAM up to 32GB, and Crossfire/SLI at 16x/16x. S/PDIF out seems to be pretty common these days.
 
skizzled said:
Seems like you would benefit most from jumping to the X79 platform and plugging in a nice 3830 or 3930. $1000 for the combo does give you quite a bit of leeway for what you can upgrade to and I would personally do the jump if it were me and not even look at anything like the Z77 or upgrading the AMD motherboard.

If you want to stay with AMD, however, you'll lose out on PCIe 3.0. Although, as it is, current cards aren't completely saturating PCIe 2.0 so its not a big deal yet and you will most certainly be able to save a majority of that money for a future upgrade. You'll also get those SATA6 ports, RAM up to 32GB, and Crossfire/SLI at 16x/16x. S/PDIF out seems to be pretty common these days.
Click to expand...

Well, my concern with going to an i7 on the X79 platform is that it's basically $700 and up to get the cheapest 6-core with a motherboard. More realistically it's pretty much the entire $1000 budget just to swap out for fimilar specs (minus the necessary sata 6gb/s ports and the possibility of using pci 3).

I'm really stuck between the option of getting a better motherboard (like the one I mentioned above), increasing my ram volume, and having faster/more storage options (without resorting to a controller card. at that point i'm just going to have more sata ports than drive bays).
 
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