AMD Gaming Rig

How much do you want to spend? That board is overkill

Here's what I used in a customer build.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml...

If you have a microcenter store nearby, check their special right now.

http://www.microcenter.com/specials/promotions/AMDbundl...

Don't know that you need to spend so much on the board. That board is expensive and overkill if you are not doing crossfire, you'd be paying way too much money for a board that can do 3 way crossfire. But with using an nvidia card, you would never use the feature. I just did a customer build with a 790x-g45 from microcenter and it's price point was about 75. That kind of difference can be the difference between the 560 you are getting and a 570. Which is the card I used in that build. Very nice.

So I'd say dump the board, go cheaper to like an 870 or 790, dump the 560 and go to at least to a 570. Also why the 1100t? Good processor for certain. But only 100 mhz faster than the 1090t at stock. If you are overclocking, they are both unlocked. And 100 mhz is not much difference. I would personally grab the 1090t and save cash there too.

If you go with an older model board say like a 790x, you will likely need a bios flash. But that's ok, on the one I built, they had a nice Windows utility, thankfully the board did boot without recognizing the chip. So I was able to get on MSI's site, get the update to install in Windows. It rebooted, gave a bad cmos checksum error, enter cmos, load optimized defaults, worked like a charm. Ratings are 7.5 for processor and ram in windows 7. 7.9 in graphics. Slowest thing was hard drive at 5.9.

The other option you could do,stay with the 560, grab the 1090t, and still go to a cheaper board. With the money saved grab a Solid State drive for your OS/boot drive. Couple ways you could do things though. With the high resolution, I think you'd benefit more by the 570 at least on other games. The 570 was able to play the crysis demo at very high specs at 1680x1050. So definitely a strong performer.

I would skip the 6 core AMD if you plan on gaming. The new Sandy Bridge processors absolutely murder the AMD chips in any game benchmark, for around the same price. I just upgraded to an i5 2500K and run it at 4.00 ghz, it outperforms my other i7 980x rig for gaming let alone the AMD chips.

This is just my .02, I used to use AMD regularly because the price/performance was right, but my last AMD was a Phenom II 965BE and I don't see myself getting another AMD chip until they come out with their next major update rather than the silly 100mhz bumps.

Also highly suggest the GTX570, I just bought one a few days ago and I am very impressed with it. I was using a GTX480 that was having some heat issues so I swapped it in favor of the GTX570 and it actually performs faster in some cases.

Yeah, except Sandy bridge was just recalled...lol. In all seriousness, Intel DOES have faster processors, no question. But it's like I told the guy I was building for. Yeah, you can go with intel, but the AMD has 80-90% of the performance, and is cheaper. For the money saved, you can go with more ram, better card, it's really in your court.

No offense arc00ta. If you can't tell I'm an AMD fan. So I'm biased, but really, I think either setup you will be happy with. Kinda hoping the boards out now may support bulldozer. The sweet thing for me is that I've got an old AM2 board that I found out will take a 1090t with a bios update. That's a 3 year old board. So that is one advantage of AMD vs intel. Though intel does does have faster chips.

I wouldn't say its much cheaper. I just put together my i5 system today, the CPU cost me $216, right next to it is the 1100T for $194. I was actually first inclined to go with the 6 core AMD to be honest, but I feel I have a better upgrade path with the 1155 socket than the AM3 which is on its last legs.

Personal preference aside, a solid quad core will outperform a 6 core in games 99% of the time, just based on the fact that 99% of games run on 1 or 2 cores.

Also, I read about the recall right after I got done building the system (crap...) we'll see what happens, but I haven't noticed any effects yet.

No offense taken, brand loyalty is part of the game! I was a serious AMD supporter up until the i7 platform came out and AMD started seriously trailing behind in some cases. For the last 10 years AMD has had the price to performance ratio right. The last intel system I had up until the launch of the i7 was a Pentium 4 Dell when they first came out.

http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/intel-halts-sandy-bridge-shipment.html



TS CHIV is a full on 16/16 CFable board so hit a better GPU like 2GB HD 6950 and even 8/8 on PCIex16 gen 2.0 for CF is fine so consider boards like Asrock 870Extreme3 or if USB/SATA 3.0 is not needed 790X chipsets

Example



HD6950 CF Toms
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6970-rade...

But if you are only running single card, I still like the 570 as a preference. Btw, who is Cougar Power? Never heard of them. New company?

I'll throw my 2¢ in and say...I love how everyone on these forums compares prices of processors alone, yet no one throws in the price of the boards. Running a single graphics card, you can get the lowliest POS AM3 board with a 1090T (do NOT spend the extra on an 1100T if you can change the multiplier) or a 955 (same concept - change the multi in 5 seconds) and you won't notice the difference. What was the cheapest P67 board offered? I guarantee it wasn't $50 - more like $120. I'd look but...oh yeah...recall. I just built a great gaming PC with a 955BE for $140 and a cheap $60 MSI 880G board. Set the multiplier to 19 for 3.8GHz and it raised the temps a whopping 10C (56C max at full load). Paired with a 1Gb 5870 it's within 15% of the speed of my 980X with a 2Gb 5870 in most gaming benchmarks and that's the difference between 85FPS and 100FPS which you're not going to notice.

My main rig is a 980X only because I run 3 virtual machines for work and do video encoding. Even that, though, is on the cheapest 1366 board I could find (MSI X58 Pro-E for $150 at the time). Every PC I've built for friends, family or for sh*ts and giggles (and subsequent selling on ebay) has been AMD because you simply cannot build an Intel rig for anywhere near as cheap. Heck, my HTPC uses an 1156 board and that even cost $100 and I don't need anything but a $40 AM3 Biostar board. Yes, Intel is faster - absolutely no argument and I'm not sure I'd go back to AMD anytime soon for my main rig. But my laptop and my kids' PCs are all AMD/ATI and they play the same games I play and their Athlon II X4s for $100 and 5770s sure don't seem any faster at 1080P resolutions than my main rig does. Naked eye and all.

OHIOU - there isn't a board out now that will support BD. I wish there was, but that will be AM3+ only...probably a 900 series chipset. I'm anxiously awaiting the day I can get back to AMD as, like you, I'm an AMD/ATI guy. I love my 980X, though - just wish it wasn't so freaking much. Business write-off, though. :-) I won't put another NVIDIA card in my machine for a long time. LOVED their 8800GT/9800GT, but when it kept getting renamed and bumpgate and...eh...screw 'em.

To the OP...the 560 appears to be a nice little card, but for that money...why on Earth would you not consider a 6950. It's faster, the same price, and the 2Gb model can be, with almost 100% certainty, unlocked via a BIOS update to 6970 speeds. Just sayin... And OHIOU was dead on in that board is overkill and you won't see a bit of difference, plus going with a single nvidia card on a board that supports 3x crossfire is insane. Now, if you were buying an AMD card, I could see it because you can always add a 2nd and 3rd down the line, but putting an nvidia card on any AMD chipset that supports crossfire is throwing your money away. If you want nvidia for a graphics card, look for a single slot (PCIe) 870 or 880 board. I guarantee you that you won't notice the 2FPS difference the board gives you.

Again, just my 2¢

Lol. Business write off or not. 1 grand is hard to swallow. I could put together a good gamer for that. AMD has just always given good bang for the buck. I honestly just do not recommend intel to my customers. To be honest, intel is faster. But I think AMD gives as much power as most people will use to be honest.

I was running an i7 980x previously, it was a waste of money for what I was doing so I ended up selling it. Still the king of the pile for multimedia though.

Anyways, if the OP is set on using an AMD chip, I would still suggest dropping the 6 core for a 4 core, maybe the 970BE. He will probably actually see improvement in performance over the 6 core judging by the benchmarks I've seen for them, unless he is using it for a lot of multimedia tasking as well.

I would drop the expensive ASUS board as well, there are many with comparable features for $100 less. Use the extra money and upgrade to 8GB RAM and a GTX570 for an efficient game machine.

I had thought the same about using a Quad core which is actually originally what I had picked... so about that hows about this then?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... - AMD Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition Deneb 3.5GHz

As far as running a crossfire setup that is probably beyond my budget as well as my needs... I want to run WoW at 1920x1080 resolution on at least high (maybe ultra) settings, give or take a few things, and get a decent stable 60+ fps. As far as cheaper motherboards, I was afraid to buy some of them after reading so many bad reviews but here are the two I was considering for more debate by those of you kind enough to answer my post:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... - ASUS M4A89TD PRO/USB3 AM3 AMD 890FX

--- OR ---

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... - GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 AM3 AMD 890FX

As far as the graphics solution, I had just heard that the Nvidia card(s) I listed were decent enough to do what I wanted, I'm not too familiar with ATI at all. If something ATI has is better to be paired with an AMD setup and for the price I'm all for that. I'd like to keep my total budget under $900-1000. I have a decent case/ PSU already so just looking for RAM (4-8GB still not sure), CPU, Motherboard, GPU ideas. Also when buying a graphics card, people have suggested ATI or NVidia and such but I don't know which brand or OEM or whatever its called to pick (i.e. ATI Radeon HD 6970 is offered by XFX, EVGA, MSI, etc.) -- am I just to read the ratings and decide for myself or do people have experiences or opinions to help me with? Keep in mind please also that I haven't built a PC since the P4/1GB ram combo I'm typing to you from lol. So alot of this is new to me! Thanks for your help so far! I eagerly await more great advice...  

Oh and last but not least I do have a 250GB that I was planning on reusing but if anyone thinks that might be a bad idea with a decent alternative I might be interested in that as well.  

WoW is not hard to run at maxed settings, the game is old. I don't personally play the game but both my roommates run it at 1920x1080 on older systems, one using an ATI 4850 and the other a GTX260 both maxed out. The game still has similar graphics to when it was released in 2003, so I would worry about what else you need your system to do.

The board you use is personal preference, I like gigabyte because they have served me well, but I agree you don't need such an expensive board to run WoW. A 790 chipset will work just fine.

Best answer selected by sorcerermerlin.