I've reached a point where I am going to upgrade in the near future and need some advice. I have a 4 year old box that I built that was built for gaming and it was fine at the time but I am now experiencing the pains of old age so it's upgrade time! I have been looking around and the choices now are dizzying to the point it makes my head spin so I thought I would seek out the advice of those who are more informed with the latest rather than continue to pore through page after page of reviews and end up with a migraine at the end of the day.
My current build has an AMD Black Edition Phenom 3-core on an ASUS mobo w/8GB of OCZ ram and 8800 GTS cards which has served me well.. till I decided to try and use my 3 24" monitors and span. Not good.
For the next build I again want to stick primarily to gaming, not go over the top but allow me to play across all three if that is what I choose while maintaining good FPS on the higher settings so I can enjoy the scenery so to speak. What I have gathered is the Intel processors are the way to go. I think an i7 may be too much and tread into the overkill category. There are a number of i5's but that is where the variety is confusing. I would like a solid overclocker, but I do not need to melt my CPU in the process of going to X speed. The motherboards selections are beyond confusing with so many different possibilities. I definitely want to have enough room to upgrade at least once, ample memory, USB and SATA as well and not making my mind up on the platform of the video card(s) I think one of the mobos that would allow me the flexibility to go ATI or Nvidia is the best option. Right now it looks like ATI simply because the Eyefinity is more polished than Nvidia's 3D surround. Again I am looking for suggestions and it would be much appreciated. I would prefer to spend more on a board that has everything and go easy on the CPU vs. a budget board and a ridiculous CPU.
I don't have a dollar value for this, I'd just like to keep it within a range where I don't have to sell my kidney on the black market to pay for this.
TIA
My current build has an AMD Black Edition Phenom 3-core on an ASUS mobo w/8GB of OCZ ram and 8800 GTS cards which has served me well.. till I decided to try and use my 3 24" monitors and span. Not good.
For the next build I again want to stick primarily to gaming, not go over the top but allow me to play across all three if that is what I choose while maintaining good FPS on the higher settings so I can enjoy the scenery so to speak. What I have gathered is the Intel processors are the way to go. I think an i7 may be too much and tread into the overkill category. There are a number of i5's but that is where the variety is confusing. I would like a solid overclocker, but I do not need to melt my CPU in the process of going to X speed. The motherboards selections are beyond confusing with so many different possibilities. I definitely want to have enough room to upgrade at least once, ample memory, USB and SATA as well and not making my mind up on the platform of the video card(s) I think one of the mobos that would allow me the flexibility to go ATI or Nvidia is the best option. Right now it looks like ATI simply because the Eyefinity is more polished than Nvidia's 3D surround. Again I am looking for suggestions and it would be much appreciated. I would prefer to spend more on a board that has everything and go easy on the CPU vs. a budget board and a ridiculous CPU.
I don't have a dollar value for this, I'd just like to keep it within a range where I don't have to sell my kidney on the black market to pay for this.
TIA