- Sep 7, 2011
- 13
- 0
- 18,510
Hey all.
After giving it some thought I've decided not to upgrade my aging Phenom X3 720 and just go for an i5 2500k chip/mobo combo. I tend to not follow hardware too closely unless I'm in the market and my head is spinning a little right now with all the options available between the P and Z zeries chipsets. I'd like to keep the whole shebang at 400 dollars or cheaper including 8gb of RAM. I'll be keeping my 6850 for now.
I'd like to do some overclocking, but I don't intend to push it too hard. 4 gz or so to start.
I play games. I'll be playing SWTOR when it hits, and BF3 mostly. Sometimes other AAA titles such as Deus Ex. I'm a PHD student so I'll be doing work, but frankly my old machine can do that. I may do video transcoding in the future but not a ton of that right now. I'd like to add an SSD boot drive that's big enough to hold Win7 (or 8 in the future) along with SWTOR and maybe a few other things, so I'll be waiting on that till costs for 120GB or larger get a little lower.
In order to keep costs down I'm going to rebuild in my current case, an Antec Sonata from a few years ago with a 500w power supply. If I ever add a 2nd video card I'll upgrade the case and PSU at that time. Just reporting what I have in case there's any power or heat concerns I should be worried about.
Connectivity I can't really see myself running more than 1 SSD, 2 magnetic and 1 optical drive. Decent USB 2.0 needed with 1 or 2 USB 3.0 would be fine
The main feature differences I'm seeing with the Z68 is quicksync and virtu, but I can't really grasp what benefit they might bring me either now in the future. I tried reading Tom's writeups but I'm really looking for a plain english answer (or link) of what they do and why I might or might not want them.
Sorry for the long write up, just wanted to include everything I think might be relevant.
Long story short, 150 dollars or less mobo and a breakdown of what z68 brings to the table. Thanks!
After giving it some thought I've decided not to upgrade my aging Phenom X3 720 and just go for an i5 2500k chip/mobo combo. I tend to not follow hardware too closely unless I'm in the market and my head is spinning a little right now with all the options available between the P and Z zeries chipsets. I'd like to keep the whole shebang at 400 dollars or cheaper including 8gb of RAM. I'll be keeping my 6850 for now.
I'd like to do some overclocking, but I don't intend to push it too hard. 4 gz or so to start.
I play games. I'll be playing SWTOR when it hits, and BF3 mostly. Sometimes other AAA titles such as Deus Ex. I'm a PHD student so I'll be doing work, but frankly my old machine can do that. I may do video transcoding in the future but not a ton of that right now. I'd like to add an SSD boot drive that's big enough to hold Win7 (or 8 in the future) along with SWTOR and maybe a few other things, so I'll be waiting on that till costs for 120GB or larger get a little lower.
In order to keep costs down I'm going to rebuild in my current case, an Antec Sonata from a few years ago with a 500w power supply. If I ever add a 2nd video card I'll upgrade the case and PSU at that time. Just reporting what I have in case there's any power or heat concerns I should be worried about.
Connectivity I can't really see myself running more than 1 SSD, 2 magnetic and 1 optical drive. Decent USB 2.0 needed with 1 or 2 USB 3.0 would be fine
The main feature differences I'm seeing with the Z68 is quicksync and virtu, but I can't really grasp what benefit they might bring me either now in the future. I tried reading Tom's writeups but I'm really looking for a plain english answer (or link) of what they do and why I might or might not want them.
Sorry for the long write up, just wanted to include everything I think might be relevant.
Long story short, 150 dollars or less mobo and a breakdown of what z68 brings to the table. Thanks!
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