Give Advice on my New Build

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moto nack

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Jul 19, 2010
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Hi all, looking for opinions on my build and looking for advice on anything someone would change. All items are not purchased yet unless I specify.

Intel Core i5 2500K
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD7-B3
EVGA GeForce GTX 580 - OWNED
Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600Mhz (4x4 - 16GB)
OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD (OS)
WD Caviar Black 2TB
WD Caviar Black 1TB - OWNED
Corsair HX1000W PSU - OWNED

If I change anything it would probably be the motherboard. Im getting the 2500K because its a great value and im primarily a gamer so it works just fine, then I would upgrade it at the end of 2012 after all the Ivy Bridge chips came out and I can pick one of those up.

Im looking for THE BEST LGA 1155 motherboard, and the gigabyte seems to be the 1 with its NF200 chip for 16x-16x SLI support. Perfect for another GTX 580 upgrade.

Any opinions would be great help if you think theres something I could improve.
 
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M

moto nack

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Jul 19, 2010
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Figured I might as well just fill all the slots as ram is super cheap. Right now the 8gb kit is 55$ and the 16gb kit is 85$, so im saving a bit of money instead of waiting. All I know is that 4GB doesnt cut it anymore, BF3 maxes out my ram causing massive lag spikes when it hits 100%
 
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M

moto nack

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Jul 19, 2010
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Thanks, I was looking at that asus motherboard and i like everything about it except the gigabyte beats it out a bit with its 16x 16x SLI support instead of 8x 8x so I'd probably go with the gigabyte
 
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jacknhut

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Sep 26, 2010
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Asus Maximus IV Extreme(P67) or Asus Maximus IV ExtremeZ (Z68) has 8x 16x 16x three way SLI support.

Note that Sandybridge CPU (except Sandybridge E) only has maximum 16x PCI-E lanes coming into it despite the fact that the nf200 chipset provides an additional 32x lane. In summary, in all of regular Sandy bridge motherboard (without NF200 chipset), the first PCI-E port will operate at 16x when you use single card set up. If you use more than 1 card set up, the first PCI-E port will operate at 8x, and the 2nd or 3rd or 4th PCI-E port will run at 8x.

Now if your motherboard has NF200 chipset, if you run single card set up, the first PCI-E port will operate at 16x. If you have dual card set up, the first PCI-E port will run at 8x and connect directly to the CPU, the next PCI-E port will run at 16x, which connect to the NF200 chipset, and then from NF200 chipset it runs as 8x back to the CPU. This is because Sandybridge only has maximum 16x lane possible.

Similarly, if you have 3 cards set up ie Tri SLI, the first PCI-E port will run at 8x, which connects directly to the CPU, the 2nd PCI-E port will run at 16x, and next PCI-E port will run at 16x back to the NF200 chipset, then from the NF200 chipset the data will return to CPU at 8x (which makes total lanes to the CPU as 16x)

The purpose of NF200 chipset is to allow the video cards to operate at 16x so that they are not bottlenecked by the PCI-E bandwidth.

Sandybridge E, however, eliminate this problem because there are total of 40x lane PCI-E coming to the CPU instead of 16x lane as seen in regular Sandybridge.

In short, you wont be able to use 16x 16x SLI when running 2 cards even with NF200. The only way to do this is to get Sandybridge E.
 
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