Choice of MB and RAM

[davidstrongarm]

Hi all,

In the following month I am going to build a system with an i7 980x CPU and two ATI Radeon HD5870 2GB Eyefinity 6 Edition GPUs. It will be used primarily for gaming, but also for graphics work and some movie rendering. I will be running three 24" monitors @ 1920x1280.

I have done a lot of reading but I am still a little stumped on how to choose a decent motherboard, and more importantly I'm confused by the huge price differences between different RAM sticks.

For the motherboard I am currently looking at the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 Motherboard (price is in Australian dollars).
Any comments on this choice? Good? Bad? Overkill?

But RAM is where I really need help. This is a list that I am trying to choose 6GB (3x2GB) of RAM from. I understand that the higher the clock speed the better, and the lower the timings the better.

But, for example, this Corsair kit (1600MHz, 7-7-7-20) is double the price of this G.Skill kit (1333MHz, 9-9-9-24).

Will these two kits perform very differently or is the difference likely to be extremely subtle?

I'm asking because I've done a lot of searching regarding RAM sticks but I can't really find any info regarding just how important clock speed and timings really are. I would like to get a good set of sticks but I don't want to fork out extra money for RAM which is overkill, and I have no idea which ones to choose.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Dave.

 

[davcon]

Here's a kit.

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=186_912&products_id=13929

 

[foscooter]

You must have bucks! Great choices so far.

The mobo is a great choice. THG used the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R in the $2K SBM.

As for RAM, the used Crucial Ballistix DDR3-1333 CAS 9.

Read the article here: System Builder Marathon, June 2010: $2,000 Performance PC.

What about Hard drives, power supply, and case?

I'd save some serious cash, and get a i7 930, and dive into a Solid State Drive (i.e. Intel X25-M 80GB), with at least one fast/large hard drive for data/media (i.e. Samsung Spinpoint F3, or Seagate 7200.12 1TB).

Good Luck aussie!