Build now or wait till June?

If you are gaming, this is all wrong.

Get: i5, 8gb RAM, HD7970.

Hi

I had nothing but problems with my crossfire setup, which is why I went for some old 480's SLI, the new GPUs from Nvidia look to be just rebrands of the 680 and Titans. Intel doesn't really lower CPU prices, maybe by like $10 big deal, expect about a %10 performance improvement over IVY bridge CPU's but at a lower power requirement. Motherboards are all pretty much the same as long as it is Z77 it will offer you the options you need, BUT if you want to crossfire/SLI you need to find a board with some x8 or x16 slots, the ASUS P8Z77-V LK is very good and about the same price.

The CPU extreme series is a good choice if you need to run tri/quad SLI/CF but the 3770k keeps up in most tasks.

Just some thoughts
Fungi

For your main question, wait. You have a good bit set back for this, wait and buy a Haswell computer. You will be plenty able to afford it. Get the newest i7 k series CPU Intel puts out next month. It will use a new socket, LGA1150 and that will be in use for a few years. You be much better off waiting.

Motherboards are important but only to a point. There can be a huge difference. For the current motherboards, I have not yet seen a function or feature that makes me want to pay more than about $120. At this point, while they may have some extra features, the new features are much more minor and don't typically add much, especially if you are not overclocking. You may consider getting a motherboard with a special chip called a PLX chip I think, I'm not 100% sure on its name. It adds additional PCIE lanes to the motherboard. This is important for you. I do not know the new Haswell chipsets yet, but most will probably have no more than 16 PCIE lanes. A graphics card can use up to 16 PCIE lanes, and needs that many for best performance. The PLX chip or whatever its called adds an additional 40 lanes, and that is the only way you will get top performance out of using more than one graphics card, unless one of the new Haswell Chipsets has 32 already. This feature is only on very high end boards though, it will be expensive, it may not be worth it to you, as two Graphics cards can still work very well using only 8 lanes each. If you do not get a motherboard with this though, I would advise going no higher than $150 for your motherboard. Not a lot of reason to like I said, especially since you won't be overclocking.

Memory: Get a motherboard with at least 4 slots for ram, and then get 4 sticks at 4GB each, which will work great for anything you do. In dual channel mode they will work faster than just two.

GPU: You should probably consider two 7970's instead. You have the cash for it, might as well get the top of the line.

Power Supply: With two GPU's and everything, that might start to run a little light. You should probably look to up it to a highly efficient 1000w PSU instead.
HDD: If you want better performance get a SSD. Games will run much better if they are on an SSD, so will other things. You don't really need a huge one, but if you get one around 128/256 will be plenty and provide much better performance, and have good amounts of room for all of your programs. Still buy an HDD, 2TB is a good idea, just if you want better performance, and to keep up with the rest of your hardware, you really want an SSD.

Crossfire I have never done, but I've read and looked up on it, it seems pretty simple to set up.

The latest games are making use of more cores/hyperthreading especially if you use multiple GPUs. My 3570k performs WORSE in planetside2 than my 1090T did, get the 3770k, you will be happier. Ram is cheap, get 16, run a ramdisk its fun. I would go the GTX670 route myself if you plan on dual GPU. AMD has an issue with there cards not delivering frames at the correct time, yes they are fast and on there own rock (I have a 7950 but CF still is a Pain in the a$$ SLI just works out of the box).

Have Fun
Fungi

If you are planning for a gaming rig, you don't need the 3770, let alone the 3960. If you are not in a hurry, I would wait it out and see what happens with Haswell.

For a gaming rig, I would be thinking more alone the lines of a 3570k with 8gb of memory and the best single gpu you can fit into your budget. SLI and crossfire are not necessarily difficult to do, but there are inherent problems tied to driver issues. You might also want to think about a 120hz monitor and what you plan to do for cooling. If you wait for Haswell, you may decide to go for the I5 version of that instead.

As far as boards go, you'll get a million opinions. Do your research on various overclocking forums and see who likes what. You will want to get a board that has a good power structure in the vrm's to support o.c, as well as one that is intended for overclocking. Asus, Gigabyte, AsRock and MSI all make good boards, and each brand will have it's fanboys and it's detractors.

Last, be picky when choosing your power supply. Get a known brand such as Corsair, Seasonic, Antec, etc. Do some reading on Hardware Secrets, Anand Tech and JonnyGuru and read their reviews on psu's.

Mark

I'm sorry, but a lot of that is poor advice.

You don't need a PLX chip unless you're using 3 or more graphics cards on the Z77 platform (or equivalent). 8 PCIe lanes is plenty for current graphics cards, particularly AMDs which tend to use less bandwidth than Nvidia (which is why Nvidia require 8 lanes per graphics card for SLI, but AMD doesn't).

4 sticks is no faster than 2 sticks when the motherboard is only capable of dual channel mode. There's also no need for 16 GB RAM for gaming, 8 is plenty.

Two 7970s seems like a poor choice at the moment, considering the shortcomings Crossfire suffers from.

A 1000 watt power supply is overkill for two graphics cards. 750-850W is more reasonable.

Fungi is correct with all he is saying. At the moment, once you get to about 4 cores, clock speed is more important than additional cores past 4. However, that is changing. IT won't be very long until more cores greatly improve performance. Just needs another year or so for the games to catch up with the hardware.

For the GPU, I recommend still going with AMD. He is right about the issue AMD has with its frames at the moment, but this issue is being fixed. The newest card out AMD 7990, which has two GPU's on one card was sent to Tom's Hardware for review with a prototype driver that will be released later this year. The driver effectively removed the problem, look it up. Sorry don't have the link handy. The 7970's crossfire performs about as well as the GTX 690. So you will be better off in performance in the long run. I'm not sure what the issue is with crossfire, but I'm sure you can find a way to make it work.

Z77 has only 16 PCIE lanes. It is true that each GPU can use 16 lanes, and that if they have access to all 16 lanes, they perform better. Nvidia will work with less than 8 PCI lanes each, and so will AMD, but the point is that they perform better with it.

Again here you miss the point completely. The guy originally said he planned to get 16GB, and 16GB does work better than just 8GB. Its a PERFORMANCE boost to have more.

The issue with the mirco stutters is being resolved, as I said in my last post, in the long term, and by the end of the year, it will be better to have two 7970s. If the guy wants just buy and use one for now, which doesn't suffer as much from micro stutters, but in a 6 months the problem will be gone and two will PERFORM better.

1000w is not overkill. The 7970 uses a ton of power, and recommends you have 500 watt PSU for one. WIth a second one will you be consuming at tops possibly 700w with everything else. Its better to go ahead and get 1000w so you don't have to worry about hitting the wall when hardware starts running.

None of my advise was poor, if you want to tell the user he can get cheaper hardware that performs worse for less money go ahead, but if he is asking for a PERFORMANCE gaming machine, that will PERFORM very well and has up to 2000 to spend, perhaps you should consider the fact he wants the best PERFORMANCE he can get before contradicting people.

Please note I typed PERFORMANCE in all caps and bolded it because I question if your eye site is bad, you clearly missed it in the original post.

Nvidia should be a lot simpler to set up than crossfire.You should have a pretty good build by the time you are through. Hope it goes well

Hmmm, maybe its time to pick up another 7950 and give CF another go... Good luck with your build!

Fungi

Yea that is the best thing about AMD, their prices for performance is great. Their recent game bundles are really good too. Nvidia may have less issues, work more stable, have no micro stutter issue, and other perks, but AMD is way more cost effective. They are fixing pretty much all of their issues, and while they can't beat the Titan in single GPU performance, they do have the fasted graphics card on the market. I just picked up a 7850, overclocked it in like two seconds, and really I just bought it for the games that come with it. Very cheap way to upgrade, and it performs amazing. Much better than the GTX 650 I had before.

But yea good luck with your build. Hope it goes well, and of course if you have more questions or issues make another post. Happy building

No, Nvidia cards do NOT work in SLI if they have less than 8 lanes available.

16 GB does NOT work better than 8 GB for games. There is ZERO performance difference. Unless you want to do something silly like run three instances of the same game concurrently.

1000W is overkill for two 7970s. They have a TDP of, wait for it, 250W each.

Okay, again you are wrong. Here are two examples for you.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157294
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131837

Two motherboards with the Z77 chipset installed. Nothing really special. So both have 16 PCIE Lanes, no more no less. Both support quad sli. So what does this mean? Lets do math. 16 lanes. 4 PCIE devices that "require" 8 lanes each. So we need 32 PCIE lanes. 16 PCIE lanes, 4 devices. 16/4=4. SO according to ASUS, Newegg, and Asrock these can do quad sli while with less than 8 lanes each, since mathematically speaking its impossible for them to have 8 lanes each since only 16 exist. Chances are that they will all work with 4 each, or more likely being that on the Asrock board one PCIE port is 3.0, that it will work with 6 lanes, two will work with 4, and the last with 2, and still function properly. So in other words, you are wrong, and SLI works with less than 8 lanes. If you have any documentation of any kind that says otherwise I would love to see it.

Why the PLX is important? The PCIE lanes determine connections to the CPU. Think of it like bits in ram, for example 64, 128, 256. Anyways, when 16 lanes are available to one card, it uses them and works the best it can. When using multiple GPUs they all have to communicate with the CPU, lowering the information flow between the first GPU and CPU, but allowing the SLI/Crossfire connection to work. A PLX chip helps because it gives 40 lanes. So each CPU can have at least 8, allowing it to communicate with the rest of the system much better, and therefore function better.

16GB does work better. Again I think we need to do math. More is better. More RAM allows information on the HDD to be stored there ahead of time drastically reducing the slow down of games as a result of constantly searching for information on the HDD, it also allows for everything else on the PC to work much better as a result of having plenty of space to work. So RAM is important, and more RAM is better. To figure which is better, lets look there is an 8, and then there is a 16. Encase you are unaware, 16 is like having 8 twice, and thus better.

Oh you know you are right on this one. I guess thats wonderful I can buy a PSU, 2 GPUS, and plug them together and have all kinds of fun! But oh wait, these three items don't work alone. I need a motherboard well that uses a bit of power. Alright good to go
Oh no hmm how will I turn it on? Best to add a case, that has lights so a little more power. Okay
Hmm still no. Lets add RAM which is more power, CPU, DVD Drive. Okay this will work
Well that failed. Forgot the hard drive. More power again. Okay lets try it
Oh well my system melted. I forgot cooling. Lets add a bunch of fans after buying new parts.
Okay its working, but I like to use more HDDs and USB devices, maybe the Internet and some other stuff. So lets just keep adding stuff like a PCIE wifi card and everything. There we go, now we have a good bit of power! This system is working great! Oh but I turned everything off and it failed. Why?

http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine

Oh not enough power. That PSU 750w I have, while highly effecient wasn't enough, being the estimated power I need for motherboard, cpu, two gpus, and ram while being specific to model for each is about 680w. I must have ran just a little over. Too bad I didn't think this could happen, who on earth would ever want enough power to do everything their system can do at once?

Really dude, think, then speak. I know its hard for you but please try next time to save me from having to correct all the inaccuracies you put on here, because if somebody doesn't then someone who really doesn't know will read what you said, think you are right, build a system, mess up in some way, and be right back here asking for help again. Please understand this is a question/answer sort of thing and you shouldn't post wrong answers.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($189.99 @ Microcenter)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($24.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($159.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Corsair XMS 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Corsair XMS 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 840 Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($99.99 @ Adorama)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($69.98 @ Outlet PC)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 2GB Video Card (2-Way SLI) ($363.98 @ Newegg)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 2GB Video Card (2-Way SLI) ($363.98 @ Newegg)
Case: Rosewill Challenger-U3 ATX Mid Tower Case ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Case Fan: Kingwin CF-012LB 40.0 CFM 120mm Fan ($3.89 @ Outlet PC)
Case Fan: Kingwin CF-012LB 40.0 CFM 120mm Fan ($3.89 @ Outlet PC)
Power Supply: OCZ ZT 750W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHAS124-04 DVD/CD Writer ($17.98 @ Outlet PC)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (OEM) (64-bit) ($89.95 @ Amazon)
Total: $1608.57
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-05-05 19:57 EDT-0400)

Use this combo, essentially their paying you to take the ram.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1291164

The ram isn't the greatest but the fact it is cas 11 won't exactly cause you any problems or should give you any decrease in gaming performance. I threw in another matching set of ram just to make it dual channel.

Also have 2 of the cheapest fans in there just as a reminder that the case will take 2 more fans.

I used the nvidia 670 as they have lower power consumption when compared to the 7970, and give quite good performance.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-670-review,3200-16.html

The motherboard listed I believe will run both cards at x8, which is equvalent to pci-e 2.0 and those cards will not be able to fully saturate that bandwidth so don't worry about performance decrease there.

The parts that I would improve on this build would first be the hard drives as the ones I put in there are more or less standard placeholders, which well good I would personalize it to more of my liking if you have the budget. The fans in the case if you care enough (or even a different case). And possibly get the combo and the free ram (sell it) and than buy the ram you want if you really care about ram speeds. And a different cpu heatsink if you wanted something higher end instead of something that just works.

EDITED IN:
8gb or ram is the standard we reccomend for gaming and will most likely be good till the time it's time to rebuild. I threw in the extra 8gb stick to make it dual channel which essentially doubles the memory transfer speed.

Yea stick with the i7, it will be better in the long run regardless of anything else.
The rest he listed seems fine too except the RAM actually. 1600 is a fine speed, but cas latency is important and 11 is about the worst it comes. The maximum speed of RAM primarily relies on Cas latency and frequency. Frequency says the speed at which information moves in and out, and Cas latency says how often it can sort of. The computer works things in operations which happen extremely fast, and the timings on the RAM say how many operations pass before that part of the RAM can be accessed again. So with cas 11 it will not be accessed again for another 11 cycles. Where as with Case 8 for example it happens every 8 cycles. This is significantly faster. The fastest RAM is represented by highest frequency and lowest timings. This is why I advised 4 sticks of 4GB earlier. On sticks with higher storage space it typically has lower stats. I don't know why this is exactly, I guess it gets hotter or harder to manage, either way this is almost always the case. You should look for RAM that is timings 8-8-8-24 with 1600 frequency is really good and pretty typically. It shouldn't cost a fortune. Trust me I don't have nearly the amount you plan to spend invested in my rig, but I have ram at this settings. Also stability goes down as you increase the timings, lower timings and lower frequency is very stable, but very slow.

I wish i lived near you, I would put it together for you for $10, shoot I would do it just for fun lol. You should not be nervous, try putting it together, its not to hard. Really its enjoyable, as long as you are gently, and careful with the CPU its pretty easy. Again you have a full community of people on here to help you also.

Actually the ram doesn't impact things that much if at all. You will only notice these things in benchmarks typically. I would actually be surprised if there is any noticeable difference in FPS while gaming from cas 11 to cas 8 ddr3 1600 ram. Going single channel to dual channel though will have a higher impact on performance as it essentially doubles your speed. Personally I rather go with 2 sticks of ram to have less parts which can go faulty on me and to leave room for future upgrades rather than use up all 4 ram slots.

I have actually tested this myself when I was overclocking my computer. When I tightened up the timings on my ram, I did so very aggressively and noticed no improvements in gameplay and only a minor bump in benchmarks. The 2 things which did improve gameplay was a 50% overclock on my e2180 from 2ghz to 3ghz, and overclocking the GPU.

As for i5 vs i7 with the hyperthreading, it's not beneficial right now. But will it be in the future, it's a possibility. Though I personally don't think it be worth it as by the time I wish I had something slightly better it's probably time to upgrade especially if your overclocking.

That's just derpy. The only way you can get quad SLI on those motherboards is with a pair of GTX 690s. So you have TWO graphics cards in SLI, with 8 lanes each. The individual GPUs in each 690 are connected by a PLEX chip, which is the same thing you see used in some motherboards to provide more PCIe lanes than the chipset supports natively. So you can run the two GPUs in a GTX 690 in SLI on ANY motherboard, even ones that are not SLI certified.

But hey, if you can tell me how you'd put four graphics cards into a mATX motherboard with only three full-size PCIe slots, you're welcome.


More RAM is not better when the games simply don't use more RAM. Many use less than 2 GB, though with Windows taking its share you'll want at least 4 GB, and 8 GB is certainly nice to give you some future-proofing. 16 GB just means Windows will cache Office and stuff like that, with no benefit to gaming performance.

As for the power supply - you're not going to find a normal combination of parts that use over 250W excluding GPUs. 750W is fine for practically all dual-GPU configurations, and 850W is plenty. 1000W is overkill.

So it's actually me that has to correct YOUR misinformation here. Which makes your patronising tone that much more inappropriate.

He is right to a point. Really the RAM speeds aren't nearly as important as other hardware such as CPU and GPU. If it is better you may experience a few seconds dropped off some tasks like using 7zip or winrar. It is not crucial. Also its a little in the user to, I feel like my system responds a little better with lower cas latency, but its just a very minor change. Also, I personally prefer having more RAM sticks so if one goes bad, not as much is lost. A lot of this on the RAM is on a personal view point and not a big deal. You can go any way you want, and even with CAS 11 your computer will work great and fast, was just point out encase the thread creator didn't know that technically lower CAS is better.

Again, agree completely that overclocking on CPU or GPU will have a much greater effect than RAM.

That is something to be concerned about, by the time games advance to using this feature something much better could be out. However, the best Haswell i7 will be on top for a few years and there is a good chance games will take advantage of it before Haswell is out the door.

Dude are you stupid or something?
If you had 3 Titans for example you could connect them in SLI with either of these motherboards and it would work despite each not having 8 PCIE lanes. The truth of it is right there but you still argue.

On your second point, again are you stupid or something?
http://www.amazon.com/HOTER-PCI-E-Extension-Cable-Adapter/dp/B0057M1ZLE
All you need is a simple adapter. You can turn the 1x into a 16x and yes it works. There are other adapters for all of the PCIE types to do this.

Regardless of how you put it, more RAM is still better. Period. There is not way you can prove it is not. A lot of tasks on the PC can take advantage of this amount of RAM. Why would more RAM make the computer cache office if it is not even open? It wouldn't. Do you even understand how a computer works?

Finally, again as that website shows, picking many of the exact parts he will probably use and the power usage is at almost 700w not counting all key hardware even. 750w PSU is cutting it extremely close. If this guys rig can't even reach 750 according to you, why on earth do they make 1500w PSU's and the like? Because some people build computers like this one which use a lot of power and 1000w is only leaving a little extra on the end if he ever needs it. Its far from overkill.

Again, everything you say is completely wrong. You don't sound like you no how a computer works hardly, and I think someone who has never built a computer before or known anything about them could do a better job picking parts and building one at this point than you could.