Gratz on the new build. Currently holding off on buying any hardware. Money constraints until pay day and also I possibly need to buy a car in a few months and replace my savings.
Something went on the fritz with it I suspect cpu failure. So I thought I might as well upgrade to sandy bridge than bulldozer.
My next rig is likely to be on the Z77 platform... It'll be an upgrade from my X48 one that still doesn't struggle... @Brave758 Let us know when you get chance to push the boundaries on it! @HybridCore, I'm an advocate of Gigabyte, having had so few boards fail over the years and only found their support helpful and rapid. I've seen issues with MSI no end, and ASUS are better now than they were 6-8 years ago. AsRock are a reliable budget boards that are trying to get in on the performance / enthusiast part of the market. Good luck to them, the more competition the better, but I remember when the likes of Tyan and Biostar attempted to do that and just didn't get the results they wanted.
OK after some quick benches using 3dmark11 and PCmark7 to compare both systems are about equal. The X58 & 980x got the better in 3D mark thanks to its physics mark and the current system got the best in PCmark (though a little unfair due to a faster SSD and more ram). And a higher clock speed, though not by much my 980 was running 3.8 at low volts
