Building a new system upgrade & can't decide: i7-3930 or i7-3820 & other

i believe any of those two cpu will be enough, just decide how much you want to spend

i would get the 3930 if i was going to make that upgrade

So if I go with the 3930, what would you recommend for Overclocking RAID motherboard, case, & memory?

mainly the cpu and the memory

Based on your needs, I think the 3930 would not be the most cost effective choice. At $600, and the LGA 2011 boards costing substantially more than LGA 1155, I think a i7-2600K is the smarter choice.

If you do want to go LGA 2011 for whatever reason, the 3820 is a fine choice. Although it does not belong to the K series with unlocked multipliers, it is eminently overclockable because you can set the BLK to 125 without much trouble, making 5 Ghz possible. Any processor over 400 dollars is just for show; the gains do not match the added cost.

If you look at some comparisons, an i7-2700k overclocked can beat a i7-3930k in some benchmarks, both given the same cooler. That's a 369$ chip beating a 600$ chip. Granted, that's not routinely, but it does routinely beat an i7-3820, so LG 1155 has some legs left in her.

On LGA 2011, the 3820 should be more than sufficient and at half the cost. Spend the savings on RAM and an SSD and you'll see bigger gains in your workflow.

Why would you pair a $50 video card with a $600 CPU? Drop to i7-2700K and get a better video card.

Browsers can now offload tasks to the video card to make things smoother.
Run a mix of Chrome/Firefox/Opera/IE to spread the browser load.

The i7-2700K is a sizable upgrade. Going from quad-core to quad-core+hyper-thread is very noticeable for multitasking, especially with light threads. 90k handles is nothing. Windows 7 goes to 16 million handles.

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Seems like the motherboards with the 2011 socket are more up to date... things like pci express 3.0, etc., so I'd rather go with at least the 3820 for that reason, although the overclocking figures I've seen 5+ ghz on 2600 are quite attractive... I agree that I don't like the idea of paying nearly 700 for the 3930, but I wonder if it would be worth the extra 350 to make it really future proof?
How much improvement does an SSD drive actually make? Would I need to have 2 in a RAID setup in case of failure for some reason? How large an SSD drive would be needed for Windows 7 Ultimate, and office applications, windows 8 upgrade down the road, etc.? I'm going with 32 gigs of ram I decided and upgrading my video to pci express 3.0 with 1 gig of gddr5 memory, and just trying to figure out the processor still and the motherboard... I really want MSI's new board, the $400.00 big bang II, which really seems amazing, but also trying to justify that cost too... I do use the computer A LOT, and am so tired of the system being bogged down, so thinking maybe the 3930 with the extra cores and threads might be worth it, but the main thing I want to find out is whether or not Windows will intelligently distribute the use of the cores amongst the simple browsers and office apps, etc., that were only written for single core cpu's in the first place??? What do you think??? Thanks for your help!

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I wasn't gonna use a $50 video card, but I was thinking $150 for a pci express 3.0 card with 1 gig of gddr5 I was planning on...

Which particular browser are you referring to that can do that?

I do use the computer A LOT, and am so tired of the system being bogged down, so thinking maybe the 3930 with the extra cores and threads might be worth it, but the main thing I want to find out is whether or not Windows will intelligently distribute the use of the cores amongst the simple browsers and office apps, etc., that were only written for single core cpu's in the first place??? What do you think??? Is it worth the extra 350 for the 3930? Thanks for your help!