Will this motherboard fit in this case that states it supports it but the dimensions aren't the same?

1. The Ti is ready ... it's long been ready and release was expected before XMas .... but nVidia is your typical cut-throat capitalist (as is everyone in the PC business ... or they wouldn't be in business) and they have a plan. Remember the 7xx series ? The original 780 design was shelved after the relative performance of the competition was determined, and the 770 became the 780 (at least this was what pundits were writing as leaked specs of the 780 matched the 770s release specs. The 780 became the 780 Ti and sat on a shelf. Then when AMD boosted up the marketing campaign for their new line, days before AMD release, they announced the Ti. I think we are looking at "Deja Vu all over again". When AMD starts spending the big bucks on advertising their new cards, I think nVidia is going to try an steal the thunder so to speak and drop the Ti. To be frank, I'd like to see AMD prepared to counter that move an sneak in a new card after that

2. Yes by all means ... use the M.2 slot. Again, to be frank, I really don't "look at SSD performance" as impacting what anything I have ever done on a PC in any significant way, but as it appears budget isn't an issue, those that I have done video editing builds for, tell me "it matters" and they do see an observable impact ... even using a 2nd SSD as a "scratch disk" for their work.

3. The idea flexible tubing running hither thither in all directions in a PC offends my engineer's anal retentive sense of "order" . So never did a personal build w/ water till I did one with rigid acrylic tubing ... it took 3 weeks hand cutting the tubing to the exact mm and test fitting all the componentry but it went smoothly.

4. I always like to say when two peeps have widely differing opinions .... "No one is ever wrong, one of us is simply misinformed." Most claims in web posts are not supported by fact.

a) "Using DDR3 over 1.5v or DDR3 over 1.20 / 1.35 will allow you to toast marshmellows at your desk when your PC goes on fire" ...Ok I exaggerated that one just for fun but it is a widely held belief that the RAM will toast if you do this. No. RAM is "governed" by the JEDEC specification which supports up to certain values. However if ya look at 99.8% of RAM kits sold, the specs on the web sites and on the package are not JEDEC compliant. These are the XMP specs aka Intel eXtreme memory profile which is by definition "overclocked". If ya look at Intels QVL for "Certified Compatible" RAM kits, there will be listed many sets outside the JEDEC specs.... at one time over 50% of the kits on the list exceeded the JEDEC specs. If you bu,t a box with DDR3-1600 when DDr3 1st dropped, it exceeded the JEDEC spec.

As time went on and production line yields improved, manufacturers were able to produce lower voltage modules. Right now, w/ DDR4, every single stick of RAM w/ speed higher than 3200 exceeds the JEDEC spec. I haven't kept up with DDDR3's improvements but I think every set over DDR3-2133 exceeds the JEDEC spec.

b) "Anything over 2 x 4GB is a waste for gaming". The 8GB recommendation started in about 2010 and it had a good run, we are now (circa 2016) seeing some games show fps increases with 16 GB. As of yet, not seen anything that has shown an improvement at 32 GB.

c) "Anything faster than DDR3-1600 is a waste for gaming". I can **prove** this statement right or wrong very easily simply by hand picking the games used to test with. Metro 2033 is limited by GPU... so the impact of the memory on fps does not change. Switch to a game like F1 that is not GPU bound and we see an 11% improvement from 1600 to 2400. Again, this is a symptom of modern society ... pick any topic say Global Warming, peeps don't go looking for factual data with which to form an opinion; they hit google looking for anything that supports the pre-conceived position. By picking only games that support your position on RAM, youtubers publish their epiphanies and users are left with slanted conclusions.

d) As above for CAS timings

5. If you are visiting this forum you're a geek ... be proud ! . And geeks are always looking to increase performance ... even when they are the bottleneck and it has no real impact. For example, if something made MS Word take input 5 times faster, it will have no effect as it won't change my typing speed.

With storage being the slowest subsystem in a PC, geekdom has been chasing the holy grail and improve storage subsystem performance. I think this is what is responsible for SSD craze as this longing for faster storage subsystems is in our DNA at this point . SSD benchmarks are quite impressive .... productivity improvement as a result of adding one are not. Only where the application requires large reads and writes is there a real measurable impact on the user. Let's say your home team drafted a freak quarterback who could throw the ball twice as fast as anyone else.... would you get home from the game any faster ? So the apps that most folks use simply doesn't matter if a file save takes 0.5 or 0.1 seconds, despite being 5 times faster, you can not react fast enough to it.

So hence geekdom's chase for that holy grail ... RAID 0 distributed reads and writes across 2 drives, so theoretically it would be twice as fast. About every 5 years or so, I test this personally, most recently with two Samsung Pro 256 GB SSDs, after 3 months of not being able to use the Samsung utilities, some technical issues, and no benchmark or other test improvements, I called Samsung which informed me that they did not support RAID 0 and don't intend do as their testing showed no benefit in doing so. Here's a post I made ... I dunno... maybe some 10 years ago on THG ... what is true then is still true today

========================================================


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0

RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.

RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2]

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
"We were hoping to see some sort of performance increase in the game loading tests, but the RAID array didn't give us that. While the scores put the RAID-0 array slightly slower than the single drive Raptor II, you should also remember that these scores are timed by hand and thus, we're dealing within normal variations in the "benchmark".

Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds; lower scores, obviously, being better. In Unreal Tournament, we're left with exactly no performance improvement, thanks to RAID-0

If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth."

http://www.techwarelabs.com/articles/hardware/raid-and-gaming/index_6.shtml
".....we did not see an increase in FPS through its use. Load times for levels and games was significantly reduced utilizing the Raid controller and array. As we stated we do not expect that the majority of gamers are willing to purchase greater than 4 drives and a controller for this kind of setup. While onboard Raid is an option available to many users you should be aware that using onboard Raid will mean the consumption of CPU time for this task and thus a reduction in performance that may actually lead to worse FPS. An add-on controller will always be the best option until they integrate discreet Raid controllers with their own memory into consumer level motherboards."

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1001325
"However, many have tried to justify/overlook those shortcomings by simply saying "It's faster." Anyone who does this is wrong, wasting their money, and buying into hype. Nothing more."

http://jeff-sue.suite101.com/how-raid-storage-improves-performance-a101975
"The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment."

http://www.scs-myung.com/v2/index. [...] om_content
"What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 "holy grail." This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain.....As stated above, first person shooters rarely benefit from RAID 0.__ Frame rates will almost certainly not improve, as they are determined by your video card and processor above all else. In fact, theoretically your FPS frame rate may decrease, since many low-cost RAID controllers (anything made by Highpoint at the tiem of this writing, and most cards from Promise) implement RAID in software, so the process of splitting and combining data across your drives is done by your CPU, which could better be utilized by your game. That said, the CPU overhead of RAID0 is minimal on high-performance processors."

Even the HD manufacturers limit RAID's advantages to very specific applications and non of them involves gaming:

http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/

Ask away ... for 25 years, we'd have my workbench (or what wife liked to call "the dining room table"covered with components as I was building for colleagues, clients, my office ... then later on w/ my kids and half the kids in school and around the neighborhood. We don't build for them ...(well the kids anyway) we sit with them and teach them how to build idea being "never have a repeat customer". Idea is not to tell them what to pick but give them access to the information so that they can make an informed decision.

My kids are doing that now, thereby reducing opportunities to "get into geek mode". 25 years ago I was staffing construction and PC related forums on Compuserve (no web yet) and we all learned tons from each other there. In deference to them, gotta "pay it forward", if no one helped me, I wouldn't have had all that fun over the last 25 years ... BuldingPCs was a great bonding experience w/ the kids and once they move out ... it's one thing we still get to share when the phone calls come in and thy wanna run a new build by dear ole dad . So I better stay current or call will drop to my birthday !