Well, a high-end air cooler should still allow you to surpass 4GHz on an i7 920. If you shoot for the Noctua NH-P12 specifically, it can cool effectively and quite silently as well. Water cooling can be more silent and cool better than any other cooling system on the market, but it won't necessarily. My personal recommendation would be that unless you're looking to OC as much as you can and/or are a real silence fanatic, a full-on liquid cooling system is probably too much money and complexity for not enough return; better to get a good air cooler (or the Corsair H50) and a graphics card with a decent aftermarket cooler instead. As per the advice given above for a GPU with an aftermarket cooler (for both cooling and silence purposes), you might want to consider going the ATI route and pick up a Sapphire Vapor-X model. I'm not sure if you'll be able to find the 5870 in stock, but you can definitely find the Vapor-X 4890, and that's right around GTX 285 performance levels for far less money per card. Whether to get one or two... well, it's up to you in the end, but the advice I usually give is this: Start with one. You can always get a second card later, but if you find that one is enough for your purposes, why spend the extra money? The 920 is absolutely the route you should take - especially as you may be looking to add more than one GPU to the build. One of the bigger problems with Lynnfield (LGA-1156/the Core i5-700 and Core i7-800 series) is that it only has 16 on-die PCI-Express lanes. That's exactly enough for one modern graphics card, but add more than that and they have to start sharing bandwidth, which Anandtech has shown can impact game performance by over 25% in certain cases. Also, I would strongly encourage you to get an SSD with this build. You clearly have the money for it, and it will speed up your system like no other upgrade really could. - Diosjenin -
Personally I have never seen any compelling evidence that running a graphics card on less than 16 lanes of PCI-E 2 has a significant effect on performance. Some recent testing done by TechPowerUp indicates that for performance to degrade significantly the bandwidth has to be reduced to one lane of PCI-E 2.
I'm not sure I'm understanding. But From what i gather, X16 on both lanes has been proven to run better(X48 v P45) in Multi-GPU setups. Evidenced by an even older article that was done on the HD48xx cards. Someone google fu for me?
hardware canucks had a nice little part of their HD5970 review where they tested if having only x8 lanes made any difference: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...-radeon-hd-5970-2gb-oc-edition-review-22.html of course it will only ever apply when you have 2 GPUs running at full whack needing all the bandwidth they can get. But it is looking increasingly likely this sort of scenario will happen in the future (which is 1 of my points when recommending 1366 over 1156).
In 3 of the 4 tests with 2 Nvidia GPUs done by Anandtech there is less than 1 fps difference between the P55 (LGA1156) and X58 (LGA1366). I would expect these results would have been within the margin of error for the test. The Farcry result was odd and I would have preferred Anandtach to investigate it further before jumping to a conclusion. With 2 dual GPUs the results are more of a mixed bag. I would suggest the differences may lie in how the PCI-E controllers are applied on the LGA1156 and LGA1366 CPUs, however the sample used is way to small to actually derive a conclusion.
Don't get that sound card, it's not even an x-fi card. It uses the old chipset from the last series of creative cards. Avoid, anything cheaper than the xtreme gamer doesn't use the x-fi chipset and uses seperate drivers. If you google you'll fine tons of unhappy customers ^_^ I'm sure someone here will recommend you an asus replacement because the attitude towards creative isn't very welcoming around there parts lol.
creative had big probs with windows vista and win7, ie the drivers were crap (and they tried to charge their customers for the EAX fix), and the whole Daniel_K incident. Asus cards seem to be alot less flaky.
A dual-GPU card still uses up only 16 lanes of PCI-E traffic anyway; for all intents and purposes it is a single card. The scaling problem is not an issue with dual-GPU cards, but rather cards that are above a certain power threshold, i.e. that once you're trying to push a certain amount of data through the PCI-E lanes, you simply need that extra bandwidth. Single-GPU cards of last generation are still right under that line where eight lanes is enough for a card running at full bore. Last generation's dual-GPU cards and this generation's single-GPU cards, though, have crossed that line - and they're only going to get more powerful from here on out. - Diosjenin -
So how would you explain the results of the TechPowerUp tests? I personally expected to see a reasonable drop in performance when the bandwidth was limited to 4 lanes however that was not what they found and I wasn't able to spot any flaws in their testing methodology. However having looked at the Hardware Canacks tests posted by Barndoor101 it appears that 8 lanes may start to begin to staurate with Far Cry 2 on its highest setting when using a 5970 at 2560x1600. That said there did not appear to be a problem running Fallout 3, Hawx or Left 4 Dead on 8 lanes with a 5970 at 2560x1600.
i think the point diosjenin is making is that current cards are right on the cusp of needing more than 8 lanes (especially at high res). with fallout 3, hawx, l4d the cpu appears to be limiting it so the lack of lanes doesnt make a difference. as stuff gets more powerful we might find 8 lanes not being enough.
Until I saw the testing that TechPowerUp has done on PCI-E scaling I would have been inclined to agree however having seen it I am not so sure. I can accept that for the most powerful (and therefore bandwidth hungry) graphics card on the market you get a minor performance penalty with 8 lanes of PCI-E 2 if you want to run at very high resolution but for anything less 8 lanes appear perfectly adequate. Future graphics cards are likely to be PCI-E 3 so unless Nvidia's Fermi cards are particularly demanding on bandwith I cannot see 16 lanes as a must have for most systems.
ok, good points here another question... Case? i want good air movement and cooling ability. Loudness not really an issue but i want to have controllers for the fan speeds and i like cable management. Antec 1200?
The Antec 1200 has unbeatable air cooling and is reasonably spacious. As far as fan controllers, there are switches at the back to control the two 120mm exhausts and the top 200mm while three control nobs are situated at the front for the intakes.
Cases are particularly difficult to recommend as they are as much about personal taste as functionality. My personal favourite is the Silverstone Fortress FT01. It is an attractive case with very good CPU cooling on air and the positive pressure approach to cooling should minimise the amount of dust that gets into the case. The upper HDD cage would need to be removed to accommodate larger graphics cards. That would also assist with cooling the GPUs. If you were looking for more space the Silverstone TJ07 is worth a look. Finally it is worth considering the Corsair Obsidian. It is a great case packed with features . The main issue with it is its cooling. It gets average results for air cooling, although they do improve if you use a H50. There are many that believe, given its price, the cooling performance is unforgivable.
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