Build Advice Upgrade after 5 years - £1400 budget

Fair enough, but are those extra PCB layers and VRMs or the R&D and marketing going to make a justifiable difference from a user's perspective? Performance, reliability and features are all I look at when buying hardware.

The £80 and £130 motherboards perform the same, they are both reliable (can't argue with the warranty), and the £80 one has all the features I need; seems like a no-brainer to me.

 

But they don't perform the same. An Asus ROG will let you overclock more, will run cooler, etc, etc. And they might both have a warranty, but the GB would still be more likely to go wrong, so you have a greater chance of having to return it and be without a MB for a while.

 

More PCB layers give better electrical signal .... leading to higher achievable OC.

Can you remember the Geforce 4 Ti 4400 ? ... This model retired from sales because it could be OC the to level of the Ti 4600 (because it shared the 8 layers PCB, with just lower frequencies), which wasn't achievable with the entry TI 4200, since it had ONLY 6 layers.

So users were not paying the premium for the 4600, when they could have the same for cheaper with a little OC on the 4400 ... so the card was retired.

 

The difference in performance is minuscule, and £50 is better spent elsewhere for performance improvements.

An overclock is likely limited by CPU temperature concerns way before hitting the motherboard limit. The OP isn't interested in extreme overclocking.

I'm not sure how that works, but it's a bit irrelevant as the motherboard won't limit the overclock here.

 

Having worked with Gigabyte mid-high and low-end boards; They Voltage droop like a b*tch. The UD7 series are the worst for it, but Asus boards will generally output the specified voltages, at bare minimum.

Gigabyte produce very resilient boards, the one in my cupboard has survived an ungodly amount of abuse and is still going, but it's a right pain in the arse that everything you set has to be 0.1v higher than you think, just to make up for the vDroop.

Edit; Part of what you're paying for with higher end boards is convenience, My Crosshair V is the most expensive AMD board going, but I feel it's got enough features to make it more than worth the cost. It runs colder, doesn't require as much voltage as my previous 990FXA-UD3, is easier to work with, the Intel NIC in there is so much faster the Ethernet on the Gigabyte board and finally; It works so much better. Going for the high-end if you're going to overclock, even if it's only by a little bit, is always a good idea; You just don't get the range of options on lower-end boards. My previous board lacked half the voltages I now tweak to balance this thing at a much lower thermal threshold than I used to.

 

The Vdroop on my board is around 0.01V with Load Line Calibration set to the middle option. There are two more aggressive options available.

I'd certainly like to know which voltage settings my board lacks compared to a more expensive one. There are quite a few settings available. Note that I only needed to adjust the Vcore to achieve 4.5GHz, everything else is manually adjusted to stock.

 

The Gene-Z is a steal at £130. Well worth the extra money. By your logic everyone should be using reference GPUs and there would be no market for aftermarket coolers, blocks, etc.

 

reference gpu are nice for fullcover waterblock

 

Yep, but presumably mm vr thinks they're a waste of time.

 

I can't see what GPU coolers and waterblocks have to do with motherboards. The Z77 chipset has a maximum TDP of 6.7W so it just doesn't need a massive heatsink like a 100W GPU does.

And yeah, if two graphics cards have the GPU at the same clock speed, the same warranty, perform thermally similarly, overclock just as well, and the other one is £50 cheaper, needless to say I will buy that one.

I hate to pull this card, but the justifications of more expensive motherboards remind me of Apple products. I'm sure all iPhone and Gene users are happy with their purchase and I don't deny that, but many would be just as happy with a cheaper alternative. I also agree that the Gene has very good value, but I think the GA-Z77-D3H has even better.

 

Was talking about reference design for GPU .... but well I prefear GPU only waterbock, because it can be reused from one GPU to another.

I do not OC, only shorten the components life, comsume more and produces more heat. My main criterias are efficiency, warranty and RMA service quality (often leading to higher price tag unfortunatly), price

 

Interesting the discussions happening here!

Taken into consideration with all opinions stated, I’m going to stick with the M5G because of the higher quality components and it’s size.
For the CPU, I do feel now that (and being honest with myself) the 3770k is way more than I need and I can justify the 3570k instead as a better choice.

For the GPU, I’m staying with the EVGA posted in the OP. I’ve looked at the differences in price between the 670 and the 680 and they are just too close in this market. The diff between the 660 and the 680 though is large, but by sticking with socket 1155 and downgrading the CPU 1 notch I can put that money towards the 680 instead and be quite happy for another 4-5 years.

I’m still focusing as well on a full cover block. In my experience I’ve been happier with a full cover than the times I’ve run a GPU only block. Just less hassle and since I don’t serial upgrade it won’t be a difference for me.

I need to order this weekend as Sweden’s court just approved the hearing on enforcing high tax to all hard drives. Looks like hard disk sales in the UK are about to go up. . .