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CPU suggestion?

T

Taipans

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 16, 2006
Messages
66
I'm looking at using the EVGA nForce 780i motherboard, I think this is a high end choice? Anyhow I am kind of confused on what CPU to pair it with. I keep reading all these ups and downs on the different flavors of Intel CPU's and need some advice. I am willing to drop up to 600 on a CPU, and this board supports LGA 775 - quad / Core 2 extreme or Core 2 due. I use the system 100% for gaming and will be running Vista 64 on it. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks!
 
The general advice is to only go for an SLI motherboard if you plan to use SLI, otherwise go for a P35 or X38-based board; the Nvidia chipsets are the only ones that support SLI but the Intel ones are considered superior for stability and overclocking. Don't get an SLI board because you might want to upgrade to SLI later, because you'll just be hunting for a discontinued card when buying a new one would be better; SLI is only worth it if you want to use it now and you have a large monitor that a single card can't run well.

For a system that's used entirely for gaming, an E8400 is probably a good bet, especially if you're planning on overclocking. An E8500 would be a little faster if you're running at stock speeds, although the price premium you pay is more than the performance increase, and games tend to be more GPU-limited (incidentally, make sure you get a good graphics card; 8800 GT or 3870 at least, I expect they'd be within your budget, if only by saving on a less expensive CPU). Avoid the E6xxx series; they were good, but they've been superseded, and the new ones run cooler and faster with less power.

You could get a quad core (Q6600 today, but probably wait for the Q9450), but most games don't currently use more than two cores well, with the notable exception of Supreme Commander. As for whether they will in the future, who knows.
 
Clocked E8500 for now, quad core when games shift to good parallel processing.
I agree that X38 is a better choice if you dont want SLI.
 
I was planning on running two 8800 GTX's in SLI as I already own one. Overclocking most likely isnt going to happen, I want something I can stick together out of the box and just go with it.

Thanks for the help!
 
Only get that second GTX if you game at a resolution of 1920x1200 or greater. In all other cases it's a complete waste of money. If you don't need SLI, you would be much better off with an Intel P35 board. They're easier to work with and while long-term reliability data on the 780i isn't available yet, the P35 chipset has been proven to be far more reliable than the 680i.

If you're main focus is on gaming, the E8400 is the way to go. Spending more than $300-$350 on a processor today is not worth it, as the performance return you'll get is minuscule to the amount of additional $$$ spent. If you're going to dabble in video encoding, image processing, or another cpu-centric task, you would do well to consider the Q6600 quad as an alternative.

Good luck on the rig!
 
I do run along with my native resolution of 1920 x 1080. I was hoping SLI could improve performance when running games maxed out like Crysis at this resolution!?
 
SLI will be of benefit at that resolution, but don't get your hopes up with Crysis. No video card setup in existence today can run that game maxed out at 1920x1200 with any sort of playable framerate.
 
If Crysis is what you want to run maxed at 1920 res, you might need to get a Skulltrail rig, to be brutally honest.
 
Skulltrail doesn't bring anything to the table to help Crysis run maxed out at 1920x1200. Crysis doesn't utilize four cores, let alone eight, and you still have the same video card options available (which is where the real bottleneck is.) In fact, the lousy memory performance Skulltrail drags with it may worsen performance.
 
I see trouble coming. Maybe you should just buy a Dell! :eek: <newb>

j/k

When do you plan on building this system? If you can wait a while, I'd say wait for the Q9450's.

If now, I'd probably say get an e8400 and overclock it. I know you said you want something out of the box. But ANY e8400 will do 3.6Ghz... so get one of those and just crank up the FSB from 333 to 400, set the dram to 2:1 (called 1:1 on some boards) and you're set.

9x400 = 3.6Ghz it should do that easily, ram will be at spec. speed 800Mhz = ddr2 800
 
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