Advice for $2250-2500 i-7 v.s. AMD Build

I'm building my first pc build soon I really need some advice on how to get the most for my money.

APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE:In 2-3 weeks...Using Tax money and won't have it back from Turbo til 8-14 days from now and then take three to 4 days to buy.

BUDGET RANGE:$2250-2500 U.S. Dollars

SYSTEM USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT:Heavy Game use, Movie watching, internet use, and other multimedia use. Also some lite video encoding, etc.

PARTS NOT REQUIRED: OS...Need everything else. Starting almost from scratch.

PREFERRED WEBSITE FOR PARTS: Newegg.com...If you can find it cheaper in another U.S. Based site I will explore other options.

PARTS PREFERENCES: I'm not sure...Wanting to get the most for my money.

OVERCLOCKING: Most likely but not all the time SLI OR CROSSFIRE: Would like to be able to but not required.

MONITOR RESOLUTION: Would prefer 1920x1200 but might go with a 1920x1080. I would also like as big of monitor as possible with quality a must. I also really like the Samsung brand monitors but will explore other options.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: As I have placed above this Build will be used mostly for gaming use. I wld like a machine that will last a while and be a good gaming machine for years to come. I won't ask for perfection but I want a beast. Also, I would like to have DX11 capability but it isn't a must if a Nvidia setup wld be better.

HaHa!!! I'm doing the same thing but was trying to stay around 1200, tell me what you think about this.

CPU

$189.99 AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W

CPU Cooler

$29.99 COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus Intel Core i5 & Intel Core i7 compatible RR-B10-212P-G1 120mm "heatpipe direct contact" Long life sleeve CPU Cooler

Motherboard

$184.99 GIGABYTE GA-790FXTA-UD5 AM3 AMD 790FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD

4-8GB RAM

$99.99 OCZ Platinum 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)

2 - Video Cards

$159.99 Visiontek Radeon HD 5750 Video Card - 1GB GDDR5, PCI-Express 2.0, CrossFireX Ready, Dual DVI, Dipslay Port, HDMI

WIFI Card

name here

Optical Drive

name here

HDD

$89.98 SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Front Bay

name here

PSU

$139.99 CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply

Case

$89.98 Thermaltake V9 Black Edition Blk Mid-Tower Case VJ400G1N2Z - ATX, mATX

Extra Case Fans

name here

Display

$144.88 AOC 22 inch LCD 1920X1080 30000:1 F22 DVI Piano Black DCR HDCP

189.99 CPU
$29.99 CPU Cooler
184.99 Mobo
$99.99 RAM
159.99 Video
159.99 Video
$00.00 WIFI Card
$00.00 OpticalDrive
$89.99 HDD
$00.00 Front Bay
137.99 PSU
$89.99 Case
$00.00 Extra Case Fans
149.99 Display
--------------------------
Total-->$1292.90 it's what i have so far.

I actully made this build for myself and plan on getting it in around 2-3 weeks but it fits your description soo here yah go.
Gaming Computer

I've added a cooler but I may be adding more within the week. Again I want to max my budget out and get the best. I really don't want the 5970. Too expensive and wld rather just spend a ltl more and get 2 5870s. Plus I keep hearing about heating problems and stability probs with alot of the 5970s and the availability for them is nxt to none. They go out as fast as they come in.

I will be going crossfire soon after I buy

Thanks for the advice...I have been looking at some of the 40gb ssds from intel...they seem to have really good reviews and no glitches or DORs and they aren't that much. I cld possibly get 2 of them but don't know what I wld do with that as of yet. I really want the 1000 psu cause I wld like a powerful psu that I cld add anything I want to it without having to check power usage and such things. But if a 850 will hold me over for a while then I might just go that route. Save me some money. I know I would like to get 2 HDDs of some kind cause I keep hearing so much about RAID 0. What kind of RAID formation could I do with 2 SSDs and 2 1Tb Samsung Spinpoint F3s? Maybe RAID 1 the 2Tbs and then RAID 0 the SSDs? Can that be done?

I ran 2 5970's and an OC i7-920 on a 750 TX fine 2 weeks ago. You don't need a huge PSU. 850W is the most you'll need even if you plan on heavy OC of the 5970's.

Don't Raid 0 a system drive ever. Much more trouble than it's worth. Especially since SSD's have such excellent performance already.

Is there a reason you want to raid? Or just for the hell of it? If you don't have a specific need, there is no real reason to bother.

i9 price estimates range anywhere from $600 to $1000 for the cheapest.

Here's a better system for >$2200 after shipping.

https://secure.newegg.com/WishList/ [...] ID=8831889

Includes 80gb X25-M which is much faster than the 40gb ones.

P55 instead of x58, but w/ a 5970, no performance loss, in fact, the 860 is a better CPU than the 920, bench's ~4% faster.

AS MTX thermal compound instead of AS 5. It's non conductive, cools as well and no very short burnin time.

Monitor, PSU, and keyboard swapped for cheaper, but equivalent/better parts.

Added a mouse.

Don't actually need xfire mobo with a 5970, but you can grab this mobo for $229.99 if for some crazy reason you want xfire 5970's. There's no benchmarks testing it yet, but you would probably be better of with x58 with 2 5970's.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product


note. You will NOT need to xfire 5970's until the next gen consoles come out, 2014 at the earliest. Anything announced or existing game will NOT max out a 5970 at 1920 x 1080. The exception is if you wanna eyefinity a buncha monitors together.

Getting back to RAID for a minute, putting 2 traditional drives in RAID 0 will see a performance increase (over a single traditional drive), but that's only if you don't mind reloading your OS and everything on it if one of the disks fails. Or if Win 7 detects a write error and retries and doesn't like the answer it gets back.

If you go with an SSD, that will be significantly faster than you could achieve with RAID 0, so if it's in your budget and you're considering it, that's the way to go for fast system response. Note that neither RAID 0 nor an SSD will help much once you're in-game, they'll mostly just help when reading/writing files.

I see what you mean Cold...I am probably going to get one traditional drive and the 2 ssds...

There's a reason the x25-V is so cheap. I has half the controller channels of the x25-M and has significantly less performance.

The x25-V is about the same performance as the Kingston SSD now in these charts.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/s [...] i=3667&p=6

Oh and Raiding SSD's loses Trim support and actually results in worse boot times thanks to RAID overhead.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/arti [...] indows_7/4

Thousand pardons on the ssds...I read up on the read speeds and your right on that part. I should go with the 80gb ssd

Comparison I've been posting.

Don' t know why ppl have such a hardon over the i7-920. It is worse at gaming than an i5. Worse at everything vs an i7-860.
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 499-8.html
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipse [...] =3634&p=16

It's 4% FPS increase w/ xfire due to dual x16in gaming is negated the 860's better performance, or completely negated by using a 5970.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipse [...] i=3641&p=7

i7-920 only ties a Phenom II x4, half it's price, even with a 5970.
http://www.legionhardware.com/docu [...] d=869&p=23

i7-920 has horrible minimum frame rates. Worse than even Core 2 Duo and Quads in some games. P55 CPU's and AMD Phenom II's don't.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipse [...] i=3634&p=8

Triple Channel offers no difference at worse, a only discernible in benchmarks difference at best.

P55 chips use less power and run cooler than x58.
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 10-13.html

The only advantage of the i7-920 is that you can upgrade to an i9 later this year. The questions is, after buying a i7-920 for nearly $300, do you really want to upgrade to a estimated $600-$1000 chip within the year?

If not, both x58 and P55 will be outdated in a year when 22nm sockets come out. Intel WILL make Sandy Bridge CPU's for 1156. They won't necessarily be hexacore, but they'll be there. No way intel would pass on that money making opportunity.

Gaming wise, anything more than 3 threads offer no improvement. So having a 12 thread CPU is kinda silly for gaming.
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 80-11.html

I have an i7-920 system and an i5-750 system. The i7 was great when I built it a year ago. Currently, I see absolutely no reason to go with x58.

You are right on the fact the 860 has a great price over the 920. Why do pc builders use the 1366 chips instead of the 1156 when building high end machines if the 1156s run faster? I mean these are gaming builds that are meant to run the best and they use the 1366 and not the 1156...Y?

People like the i7-920 because it WAS the best overall CPU for a long time. Hard to change people mindsets once they get somethign stuck into their head. (Intel advertising to sell the more expensive 1366 platform doesn't help either).

P55 has only been around a few months.

In gaming, the i5-750 is all you need. Actually, even a Phenom II X4 will max out games fine.

Gaming is GPU limited, NOT CPU. Not even a 5970 can break that barrier.
Read the legion hardware article above for evidence at max settings with top of the line components.

Read this Tom's article showing the same issue exists at lower settings/resolutions and mainstream hardware.
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 46-16.html


Reason people get an i5-750 over Phenom II is that it's a relatively small price jump up, but you get much better performance outside gaming. It also runs cooler and uses less power (though the power savings is like $8 a year assuming 8 hrs of use a day).

I can take a $1000 i7-975 and pair it with a 9600gt and get 8 FPS in Crysis.

I can take a $100 core 2 duo E6400 and pair it with a 5850 and get 28 FPS.

I can take a $290 i7-920 and pair it with a 5970 and get 43 FPS at 2560 x 1600.

I can take a $140 Phenom II x4 and pair it with a 5970 and get 43 FPS at 2560 x 1600


Hopefully the point is getting made =D

Unless you're encoding, rendering or compressing at the same time as you're gaming, any modern CPU will work fine.

Edit: Other common CPU hog would be anti virus scans. Having photoshop, 20 firefox windows, torrent program, itunes, IM, Office, etc open while gaming does not impact performance in modern CPU's.

bump