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New Eyefinity gaming rig advice

L

Le Creuset

n00b
Joined
Oct 8, 2009
Messages
29
Hi guys,

I've been building my own systems for over a decade and I'm retiring my old gaming rig (see my sig) it served me well these past years but it's time for something new. Here's what I'm thinking about, just give me your honest advice. This rig will be purely for gaming. Budget is about €3000 without monitors

- i7-2700K
- Asrock extreme7 z68 or Professional gen3 z68 (anyone familiar with these?)
- Crossfire XFX 7970 Blacks (yeah blacks, for some reason all the past GPU's I bought were really really bad overclockers :mad: ...so not risking it this time around), one more to be bought at later date to get tri-fire
- Silverstone Raven 03 for the silent build, my old man build his latest rig into that case and it's pretty sweet and silent!
- Some 16GB DDR3 2300Mhz (Geil or corsair)
- Silverstone 1500 watt psu, overkill I know but just to be future safe
- about 3TB of HDD and a Corsair or OCZ SSD sata 600 for windows etc

I'm looking for serious FPS in eyefinity playing say BF3 or Crysis 2 that sort of stuff

So any advice? :)
 
I'd wait until April so you can get Ivy bridge and see what Nvidia's Kepler has to offer.
 
Yeah I know, but allready sold of the old rig and using my Asus G60 for some gaming, trust me if I play bf3 for a few days longer it's gonna destroy this poor little thing... I've been reading up on the kepler 'leaks' and it sound like complete BS to me... and ivy bridge can't be that great, it's just a die shrink, so perhaps 5% better performance at same clock? even the Sandy bridge-E 6cores perform marginally better in gaming compared to the quads, 1fps more?
 
Le Creuset said:
Yeah I know, but allready sold of the old rig and using my Asus G60 for some gaming, trust me if I play bf3 for a few days longer it's gonna destroy this poor little thing... I've been reading up on the kepler 'leaks' and it sound like complete BS to me... and ivy bridge can't be that great, it's just a die shrink, so perhaps 5% better performance at same clock? even the Sandy bridge-E 6cores perform marginally better in gaming compared to the quads, 1fps more?
Click to expand...

Kepler may force AMD to reprice their cards, if price is no object for you buy two 7970s and be happy. But you may want to hold out for GTX 680s. Personally, if were to have waited this long, I wouldn't mind waiting two months and then going ahead with the build the moment the new hardware is released. IB will not be a big improvement for gaming, most games are GPU limited today.
 
Le Creuset said:
- i7-2700K
Click to expand...
Note that for gaming purposes, there's not much of a difference between the 2700K and 2500K in gaming. Probably a 5% performance under the most ideal of conditions. But often times it's less than that. So you could cut costs here without a noticeable performance decrease
Le Creuset said:
- Asrock extreme7 z68 or Professional gen3 z68 (anyone familiar with these?)
Click to expand...
My main issue is that these mobos are fairly expensive for what they are. In addition, they only have a two year warranty considering that other manufacturers have 3 year warranties and above. Before I recommend another mobo, please answer the following questions:
6) Will you be overclocking?
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video? etc.

Le Creuset said:
- Some 16GB DDR3 2300Mhz (Geil or corsair)
Click to expand...
Do note that the SB platform doesn't benefit that much from higher speed RAM. In fact, you would not notice an iota of real world performance difference between DDR3 2300 and DDR3 1333 with a SB setup. With that said, DDR3 1600 is not that much more than DDR3 1333 and might be worth getting if IB is an option as IB supposedly supports DDR3 1600 RAM speeds natively.

So in other words, ditch DDR3 2300 and stick with either DDR3 1333 or DDR3 1600 RAM. Also make sure that the RAM is rated at 1.5V or you risk damage to the CPU.
Le Creuset said:
- about 3TB of HDD and a Corsair or OCZ SSD sata 600 for windows etc
Click to expand...
SSD wise, I'd recommend the Crucial m4 SSDs over OCZ or Corsair SSDs as they're far more reliable, stable, and has better customer support while not being that much slower than sandforce based OCZ or Corsair SSDs. If you have to buy a Corsair SSD, I'd recommend the Corsair Force GT series as those are generally faster than other Corsair SSDs. I'd avoid OCZ due to their poor customer service.
 
overclocking should be fairly easy with the K series...but I read that those Z68 Asrock boards have some serious build in one click OC buttons in the bios... should really be easy, other than that a good no raid or firewire needed, just sli / crossfire support needed really.
 
Then these mobos would fit your needs just fine:
$185 - Asus P8Z68-V/GEN3 Intel Z68 ATX Motherboard
$205 - Asus P8Z68-V Pro/GEN3 Intel Z68 ATX Motherboard
 
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