Thinking of a Bulldozer System

[cldudley]

Hello,

I am building a new gaming rig, which I will also use for a number of other tasks, including software development, DVD transcoding, the usual multimedia stuff. I am going with a Radeon 7970 card, and since it's an AMD GPU I wanted to go with an AMD CPU also. I have my eye on the FX-8150 right now (also 16GiB of DDR3 1600, ASUS Crosshair V mobo), in my mind this should be a pretty killer setup, but before I blow $2800 out the door (going all out, new monitor etc) I would like second opinions.

I play WoW, Metro 2033, Darksiders and I want to get into SKyrium soo. I currently have a Core 2 Duo 8500/Radeon 6850, which has been a workhorse, but at almost 4 years old he is starting to show his age. (The graphics card is new-ish, was excessed from my dad's job when it wouldn't fit in the machine they ordered it for. This computer originally had a GTS 250)

 

[deadjon]

Not to start a flame war here -

Avoid Bulldozer (do your own research to confirm this)

If you're doing multimedia apps wait till April and buy an i7 3770K - the benchmarks confirm its performance in Productivity and games. Its an excellent choice if you can hold out a month or so! It also supports PCI-E 3.0 and the shiny new Z77 chipset.

If you go for the 3770K it will augment the 7970 with superior performance and PCI-E 3.0 compatibility. AMD don't make their GPUs so they run different on Intel platforms, thank god.

 

[Wisecracker]

AMD Phenom II X4 970 Deneb 3.5GHz: $130 (before a 10%-off coupon floating around)

New BD steppings will be rolling out soon enough. Should be a good thing.

 

[cldudley]

Best answer selected by cldudley.