Widescreen Gaming Forum

So I'm upgrading my PC
I've already order 3 Dell 2709W monitors, they arrive on friday
I purchased a Sapphire HD 5970 video card
I puchased the HAF 932 Limited Edition case, Red with the AMD Dragon on the side.
Already have a Thermaltake ToguhPower 750W modular PSU

Now I'm shopping for the Motherboard/CPU and memory.
I've been looking at the Intel i7 930 which just released and 12Gb DDR3 1600 ram
Not sure on the motherboard yet.

But I'm also wondering how good is the AMD X4 965?

Currently I have an ASUS motherboard, Q6600 CPU (not overclocked) with stock fan and 4Gb ram

I was going to keep my current motherboard,CPU and memory and just add 4Gb more of memory and just move these to the new case but the wife said go ahead and get the motherboard/cpu/memory and give my old system to my son.

So now I'm trying to decide what to pruchase.

Any help is appreciated.

Joe

If you do any video encoding, the Core i7 is the route to take - I like the Gigabyte EX58-UD5, but I think that's been replaced with a better model... another option if you fancy a lot of overclocking options is the eVGA Classified (there are various flavours of this...)

If you don't do a lot of video encoding, and are just after gaming and general use, then the Phenom II is a good chip. Not sure about current AMD motherboards though... :(

I don't do any video encoding.

I mainly do software development and gaming
I work from home and I use Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 64 Bit

Games I currently play
Dragon Age Origins
Call of Duty: MW2
Rogue Warrior
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
Wolfenstein
FarCry2
Crysis
Unreal Tournament III
Company of Heroes
Neverwinter Nights 2

Visual Studio 2008? Smells to me like the program that will eat your MHz's for breakfast. Correct me if I'm wrong though...

I'm just throwing this out there, but when I hear that somebody has a Q6600 and doesn't do video encoding; I immediately think they wont be needing a CPU upgrade.

Although I'm not familiar with ATi cards so maybe that card of yours will get bottlenecked by the Q6600. And if you are felling sluggish with Visual Studio 2008.

Also, Rogue Warrior? Really?

_________________
EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0 3.5GB | 3 X LG Flatron 24EA53VQ in Nvidia Surround | Optoma HD20

My son is the one who plays Rogue Warrior.

I mainly play Dragon Age Origins and COD:MW2

I've not found VS 2008 sluggish on my current system. I would keep my system but I'm thinking the CPU would definitely bottleneck the 5970.

*copy paste from another thread*
Always a good source of information and reviews, but they also provide this:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gami ... 31815.html

and this:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gami ... 31807.html

As a rule of thumb if your going to be only playing games you don't need an expensive CPU, you'll only need an expensive CPU if you do allot of CPU demanding tasks, like video and audio encoded, 3D rendering of large software compiling. So you should always spend more of your GPU because 9 times out of 10 thats where the game will bottleneck.

Edit: oh, the only other reason you would need an expensive CPU is if your a serious overclocker.
<-- i7 920 @ 4.0GHz with HT still turned on, on air, which in fairness isn't do hard to do with a D stepping 920.

To add, from what you want to use it for you don't need to splash out for an i7. If you want to keep your motherboard, check its support and get a Q9400, Q9550 or Q9650(think that last ones right), if you want to get a new motherboard and in such go with DDR3 RAM you'll ether want an i5 or a Phenom II X4 from AMD.

Also, you will want to think about the i7 900s if you run more then one graphics card as the LGA 1156 based motherboards only have 16 PCIe lanes, but thats in the top link, basically just read the links.

_________________
: ) Skid : )
My Multi-Monitor Focused YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SkidIncGaming
My Twitch channel which I've been known to stream on from time to time: http://www.twitch.tv/SkidInc
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality."

Well, I made my purchase.
I went with the following:
ASUS P6X58D Premium
Intel i7 930
WD WD1002FAEX Hard Drive 1 TB - SATA 6Gbs
OCZ Gold 12GB (6 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Low Voltage Desktop Memory Model OCZ3G1600LV12GS
2 LITE-ON 24X DVD Writer Black SATA Model iHAS424-98 LightScribe Support

Along with the items already coming
3 Dell 2709W monitors
Sapphire HD 5970 video card
Chief Technologies monitor array
Cooler Master HAF 932 (AMD Limited Edition)
Deck Legend Keyboard
G500 mouse (already have)

I can't wait to assembly this system over the next week once everything arrives.

Joe

Sounds like it's gonna be a great system! Hope the build goes smoothly! :D

I knew you were already 100% sure on geting a new PC regardless what people will suggest (like saving money by not upgrading everything). But anyways, since you already bought it, I hope it will be worth your hard earned cash coz that's a lot of money spent for just gaming and visual studio. Also, most of your games you listed do not really support native triple screen resolutions or at least not optimized.