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Which i7, my q9300 had died - i believe.

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I upgraded my system to sli gtx 570's and now my q9300 processor seems to be on its way out. Its highly unstable and i have consistent freezes. I ran intel burn test and it froze each time i did it on anything above high load. I have checked the video cards, the cables, the hdd, the memory and the board is a brand new board as is the psu.

But my question is; which processor should i get. I do a lot of high end gaming as well as heavy multitasking. But i have a pretty strict budget. Since i will need a new motherboard and ram to replace my current setup.
Any thoughts on processor, mb and ram?

I wont give an exact amount of my budget just because i dont want to buy something that isnt really the best idea or that will bottleneck the graphics cards. But at the same time i cant afford things like 1000 dollar processors.

Currently
q9300
mb: 750i FTW
Ram: ocz ddr2 reaper
sli gtx 570
corsair professional 850
intel x25 ssd (boot)
wd black sata hdd (storage)


More about : q9300 died

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CPUs Master

Did the freezes start when you installed the GPU's? Have you tried the system with the cards individually?
If you are upgrading either wait for LGA1155 or go with LGA1366 and I7 950.

rolli59 said:
Did the freezes start when you installed the GPU's? Have you tried the system with the cards individually?
If you are upgrading either wait for LGA1155 or go with LGA1366 and I7 950.


There were a lot of things that happened when i upgraded my gpu. When i first got them my mb crashed, i rma'd and then it started out with media reading errors then i tried installing windows 7 again and it kept giving me a windows boot error. Then i got that fixed, turned out it was a combination of my ide cd rom and some bios settings.

Then when i got it up and running, i had consistent freezing, less than 10 minutes of the pc being on.

I have tested the cards one at a time, in each slot as well as using my old gtx 260. In all cases i got the same rapid freezes. I tested out my hdd by using a different hard drive and loading windows, but it still froze right as install was finishing. I tried switching out all the cables with the same results. I tried both running memtest on my memory and running single stick sin each of the slots, same results.

Long story short, the pc is pretty much unusable.
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bearclaw99 said:
Does it still freeze if you take one of the 570s out? If you take both out?

Yes it still freezes if i take one of them out. I have tried both cards in the case, solo and it still freezes as well as my old 260. And i cant take both out, i wont be able to see if it freezes.

So i was thinking of these for my upgrade;

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Do you think its to much?

I will be running sli gtx 570 with an ssd boot drive. I dont want anything to be bottlenecked, that is probably my biggest concern.

Not sure if i linked the urls right. i just copy and pasted, let me know if there is a better way.
CPUs Master

Nice X58 setup there, but honestly if you're going to buy a whle new core system I'd wait until the Sandy Bridge recall is done and is back on the market - it kicks everything else into the dust and is a bit cheaper too.

Note that it's only the motherboards that have an issue, not the processors themselves, and all boards will be honoured with RMA even if you buy now. I know a lot of places have pulled the whole lot, but you could consider getting a 2500K or 2600K with RAM and motherboard now and RMA it a bit later.

Also, if you're not going to be using any more than 4 SATA ports, you won't even be affected by the problem - both SATA III ports are fine and the first 2 SATA II ports are fine too. Don't use SATA II ports 2 to 5 and you won't even need to RMA the board (and any problems you could face probably won't even occur - allegedly it's about 15% failure rate of those SATA ports in about 3 years with "normal" use).

Ultimately though, if you don't want to wait until April then the system you listed above is more than good enough.

LePhuronn said:
Nice X58 setup there, but honestly if you're going to buy a whle new core system I'd wait until the Sandy Bridge recall is done and is back on the market - it kicks everything else into the dust and is a bit cheaper too.

Note that it's only the motherboards that have an issue, not the processors themselves, and all boards will be honoured with RMA even if you buy now. I know a lot of places have pulled the whole lot, but you could consider getting a 2500K or 2600K with RAM and motherboard now and RMA it a bit later.

Also, if you're not going to be using any more than 4 SATA ports, you won't even be affected by the problem - both SATA III ports are fine and the first 2 SATA II ports are fine too. Don't use SATA II ports 2 to 5 and you won't even need to RMA the board (and any problems you could face probably won't even occur - allegedly it's about 15% failure rate of those SATA ports in about 3 years with "normal" use).

Ultimately though, if you don't want to wait until April then the system you listed above is more than good enough.


I am not sure what the benefit is for the sandy bridge cpus, do they just out preform the x58 series? Also when are boards going to start coming back out for them?

Thanks for the reply.
CPUs Master

The Sandy Bridge chips stomp over the X58 chips in terms of performance, they run cooler, use less energy and are monster overclockers.

And a bit cheaper than X58 systems too.

The only real downside is the stupid number of PCI-E lanes so you can't run SLI or Crossfire at full 16x/16x. The top-end 1155 boards do use bridge chips to get the lanes back up though.
CPUs Master

To be honest I probably made it sound a bit more doom and gloom than it actually is.

1156 had the same PCI-E lane thing and benchmarks showed that real-world performance doesn't see any hit - about 5% I think it was - so no, there's no issue running your 570 SLI.

You could get a board with a NF200 chip on it which acts as a repeater, effectively bringing your SLI back up to a pair of 16x lanes. The Gigabyte P6A7-UD7 is one such board and it's a monster. The Asus Maximums IV Extreme is another (although Asus do a weird thing with their bridge chip so you only get the 16x lanes if you use 3 cards - go figure). They do cost a bit more though, but you'd save money only needing dual-channel RAM and the two K series Sandy Bridge chips are about the same price as the 950 you listed, so you make some savings anyway.

But as I said, running your SLI on 8x/8x lanes won't cause any appreciable performance hit.

Also, you may not need Hyperthreading, so you can get a i5 2500K instead of the i7 2600K and save a few more bucks there.

i also read that the re-release of the 1155 mb arent going to be until april. Is there really a big enough difference to have my pc unusable for 2-3 months in waiting for the sand bridge? I am also worried, i play a lot of high end games that are resource demanding. Will i notice running on 8x instead of 16x?

Thanks for the replies too :) 

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CPUs Master

I guess it's all a matter of perspective. See what you make of these points then:


- why pay more for obsolete tech? Sandy Bridge is better than everything, short of the 6-core i7s and even then only when all 6 cores can be used.

- SLI using 8x/8x lanes has no perceptible effect in the real world, and benchmarks only show a minor performance drop (like 5% or so).

- going X58 now leaves you no upgrade path in the future

- if you can get a Sandy Bridge motherboard now you can still RMA it come April when the new boards start shipping, and if you don't use SATA ports 2-5 you'll never even risk having the issue crop up.


BUT

- you'll have to wait until April until the Sandy Bridge motherboards are back on sale

- the i7 950 is no slouch! You'll have a very powerful platform if you go X58 that will last a while.


That's the way I see it.

Personally I'd wait until April if you can't get a Sandy Bridge board now (and RMA it later on). It's not like you're dropping a few bucks on some really cheap old tech to fill a gap, you're paying a lot of money for something that is now End of Life. But, X58 is still a great platform and you'll be kicking gaming ass for a long time to come.


Your call dude.

LePhuronn said:
I guess it's all a matter of perspective. See what you make of these points then:


- why pay more for obsolete tech? Sandy Bridge is better than everything, short of the 6-core i7s and even then only when all 6 cores can be used.

- SLI using 8x/8x lanes has no perceptible effect in the real world, and benchmarks only show a minor performance drop (like 5% or so).

- going X58 now leaves you no upgrade path in the future

- if you can get a Sandy Bridge motherboard now you can still RMA it come April when the new boards start shipping, and if you don't use SATA ports 2-5 you'll never even risk having the issue crop up.


BUT

- you'll have to wait until April until the Sandy Bridge motherboards are back on sale

- the i7 950 is no slouch! You'll have a very powerful platform if you go X58 that will last a while.


That's the way I see it.

Personally I'd wait until April if you can't get a Sandy Bridge board now (and RMA it later on). It's not like you're dropping a few bucks on some really cheap old tech to fill a gap, you're paying a lot of money for something that is now End of Life. But, X58 is still a great platform and you'll be kicking gaming ass for a long time to come.


Your call dude.


Thank you for all the good input.

I ended up going with the 1366 simply because i figured the waiting time to get the 1155 wouldnt be enough of an improvement to justify it.

The end system is:

i7-950
Rampage iii Formula
corsair dominator 3x2gb ddr3
sli gtx 570 powering one monitor
gtx 260 powering my other two monitor
x-25 intel ssd
wd 750 gb black edition slave drive.
corsair 850 w professional psu.


Again thanks for all the great feedback.
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