Core i7-3930K and x79 vs 2600k with z68

For Gaming.

It really depends on your budget and your GPU. An x79 system will definitely be faster and more responsive system because of it's six physical cores. It will also support quad-core ram and PCIe 3.0 for future better Video Cards. The downside is that the intel core i7 3930k will need the new LGA2011 socket on your motherboard.

On the other hand a 2600k is the most cost effective processor that can be overclocked fairly well. At about 320 dollars you will get a decent processor on an older yet very good chipset. This however doesn't support PCIe 3.0 so if you plan to keep your PC for decent amount of time this may not be your best choice.

Although I prefer x79 systems, your build will ultimately depend on your Video card and it will bottle-neck your processor during gaming if it is not good enough.

Gigabyte X79-UD3 -- 4x PCI-E x16, 6x SATA 6Gb/s is the Mobo I'm considering and it says it's socket 2011 and PCI-E 3.0 ready.

Is this a decent X79 mobo?

My other choice was the Z68 ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z -- 2x Gb LAN, 4x PCI-E 2.0.

And of course the two processors that go with them respectively.

I am in the buisness of future-proofing and money isn't an issue but the the differences in the whole computer build with only these two parts varying comes down to only a ~200 dollar difference in total. This is a new build, and to answer your question pertaining what my gpu is; I have none, but they will be two gtx 580 3gb versions that I insist on running both sli x16 by x16 mode which I believe both of these motherboards will allow me to do.

Is that information sufficient to provide me the answer as to whether I should go with the socket 2011 and 3930K?

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that games do not take advantage of Hyper Threading.

Doesn't Battlefield 3 take advantage of hyperthreading? Also I play Arma 2 a lot and I thought it did as well. I also am hyper excited for Arma3.

Thank you for the replies.

Well... I was thinking about adding a good sized ssd because that would help my Arma 2 pop-in and texture loading. I would be able to afford that if I went with the 2600k. But I did think that the games I play the most did actually make use of 6 cores and hyperthreading.

i just installed a 2600k in my new setup today and actually you can support pci-e 3.0 on z68 platform if you get a generation 3 board

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Com [...] ctId=47124

If memory serves correct, there are only 2 ways you are going to get 2-way SLI at x16x16, either with the X58 or x69 chipset.

When running a single display at resolutions at or below 2560×1600 2-way SLI at x8x8 or x16x16 has the same peformance.

As per the following http://www.hardocp.com/article/201 [...] 16_vs_x8x8

Also, keep in mind and some food for thought...

Currently, gaming performance is hardly affected whether you are running 2-way SLI in x16x16 mode or x16x8. At most there might be a performance drop of a couple FPS depending on the game and resolution, however in some cases x16x8 is actually better by a couple FPS.

So, when talking about such small performance differences, real world game play is not affected at all.

I am running 2x GTX 580 SLI in x16x16 on the P9X79 Pro with an i7 3960X myself, but plan to use the other 3rd PCIe x8 slot for another add-on card (non-GPU, PCIe x1) which will force the 2-way SLI into x16x8 mode and I will at least have the piece-of-mind that it will not affect any currently released games or any released game pre-PCIe 3.0. I had also tested this theory with a simple PCIe x1 WiFi card.

But don't take my word for it, check out the following for more info regarding x16x16 vs x16x8 http://www.hardocp.com/article/201 [...] vs_x16x8/1

The bottom line: only 1 thing is going to give a performance increase gaming-wise (given all other components remain the same and using a single display), faster GPUs. PCIe 3.0 will undoubtedly allow for even greater performance increases, however, if faster GPUs based on PCIe 2.0 are still rewarding better performance, then we clearly have not hit the PCIe 2.0 limit yet. Also, if 2-way SLI in x16x16 is virtually the same as x16x8 and x8x8, perhaps there is much more room for increases there as well through optimized games/drivers for SLI. Or maybe, SLI is saturating the PCIe 2.0 bus and so there is a real reason to move to PCIe 3.0 in the case of SLI...

@jumex since the data transfer rate of PCI-E 3.0 is twice that of PCIE 2.0 , running two slots at x8 and x8 each will be running PCIE 2.0 at x16 x16. and that is more than enough.

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 63-13.html


With a drop in performance

Since he is planning on using GTX 580, its pretty much a dead point since the cards can't do pci-e 3.0

As I mentioned in one of my above posts, there has been a few cases where Hyper Threading has a significant impact on BF3 performance. It doesn't happen to everyone, but one person did state with HT on he took a 25FPS drop, a bit extreme compared to the results THG got, but there are a few complaints about a large performance drop when you do a Google search.