Build Advice Big system upgrade: can I get away with current CPU and other questions

So my current build is in my sig (been using for ~2.5 years). I am coming in to a decent bit of cash in a few days and I'm starting to feel upgrade fever again but this time I can afford to act on it!

My main question is whether I can get away with sticking with that CPU/Motherboard & Cooler for a bit longer. Will that still be able to run newer games well and support the new GPU's and SSD I am planning on?

Potential upgrades:
Display: 30" Dell U3011 (16:10 1600x2560)

GPU: 2 x Reference 2GB GTX 680's
I am thinking I will need something this powerful to suitably run the above screen at a decent framerate with high settings on modern games.
Would I be better off going for 4GB versions because of the amount of screen real estate I will have?
How do I tell if a card is reference, I want to upgrade to water cooling once I upgrade CPU/MoBo so presumably I need to be going for ref cards?
And, would I be seeing a big performance hit from running these on x8 x8 on PCI2.0 slots until I upgraded to something with x16 x16 & PCI3.0?

PSU: What kind of power would I need to support this rig? Presumably the 650W I have now would be lacking?

Case: Corsair Obsidian 800D
This is in line with my plans to upgrade to water cooling in the future

SSD: I'm split between the Crucial M4 512GM and the Samsung 830 256GB. 830 is considerably faster from what I can see but the 512GB is out of my price range but I will need more space than 256GB if I want to keep all my programs/games installed at once. Also, how much of a performance hit will I be seeing from only utilising the SATAII speeds on my MoBo?

Hard Drives: 3 x 3TB drives in RAID5 (Effective 6TB space)
Any specific drives I should look for or avoid here?
I'll be keeping the 2TB I have as a drive dedicated to seeding and the 1TB's will be used for offsite storage of most important stuff as my backup solution at the moment is lacking.

RAM: 8Gb (2x4Gb 1,600 MHz sticks of DR3)
I'll more than like sell the other 4Gb I've already got there.

p.s. Sorry for so many questions at once go but I want to be sure of my decision before I drop ~2.5k on this upgrade

 

I don't, honestly see the need for 2x680, for a single screen, even at 2560x1600. Even a GTX670, on it's own, will give for instance BF3 Ultra fxaa-high an average of 61 fps. I was thinking, for my rig, of two GTX660Ti's for that res., and was told I was going stupidly OTT.
Whilst whatever you do might not be as brilliant, until you upgrade CPU/mobo, with Haswell not that far away, it might be a case of making do, until it becomes clearer, what's the way to go, for the future. Wish I had a crystal ball to know, myself.

 

Here's my 2 cents.

you are wasting your money on the monitor and GPU's in this design, you can get a quality 27" for almost 1/4th the price of a 30", or get a 32" HDtv for about 1/3rd the cost. The resolution is lower, but in game that won't make much of a difference other than giving you a better framerate. That being said, get the 30" if you want it, it's likely to outlive this computer and the one after it, so it's hard to call it a bad investment if it makes you smile every time you look at it for 5+ years.

At the moment a single top of the line gpu will be able to run any game you throw at it, getting two now will take the fringe cases from good framerates to great framerates, while boosting your power bill and making your rig run hotter. I would get one top-end card now, and in a year or two when you need a speed bump, get a second one at a lower cost and without any of the buggy drivers and game profile issues that will get hammered out over the next year or so.

while you might be limited by using pci 2.0 slots, 8x lanes vs 16x lanes actually makes fairly little difference, the potential bandwidth of pci is massive, much more than a gaming computer can hope to saturate, so don't go nuts trying to get dual 16x lanes because it's not gonna make a real difference in the lifespan of this computer.

You can expect to see a pretty huge performance drop going fro SATA2 to SATA3, most manufacturers quoted R/W speeds for SATA3 are just under double the speeds for SATA2. I wouldn't suggest keeping all your programs on SSD though, excessive usage will wear the drive out early, and your RAID array will be plenty fast for loading up a word processor. I only keep games and large programs like Photoshop on mine, I even leave windows on HDD because my boot times aren't that bad and it's a space hog that is constantly reading and writing.

I'm a big fan of RAID 5 and I think it's a great investment. I have been researching HDD's for use in a mass storage pod for my work and according to a major remote storage company Backblaze the most reliable drives are made by Hitachi, but looking about reveals that they are a bit more expensive than the competition and come with a 32MB cache. All the manufacturers make good drives, so if you want to spend a bit more for the low fail-rate then Hitachi it is, otherwise just grab what's cheapest from one of the big names. Your RAID 5 array will double the individual R/W speed of the drives you put in it, so the slight performance differences between drives shouldn't be too important.

My recommendation is that you pass on the second GPU and invest in a new CPU/mobo up front. Your old gear will bottleneck the new parts and you'll just end up having to build the computer a second time to swap out the motherboard. Haswell isn't expected out for ~6 months so I wouldn't wait for it.

I would go ahead and get a quality modular PSU in the Kilowatt range, compared to the cost of this rig you won't save very much by getting anything smaller, and nothing bad happens if your PSU isn't maxed out.

I think that covers it, I'm not familiar enough with the latest generation of parts to name specific products (plus, I'm american so i'm not very familiar with the vendors you'll be using), but I have a lot of experience designing systems so I can always give some input.

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Considered a 690 over the SLI 680s?

EDIT:

You can ignore the above completely, most of the rest of his post is pretty inaccurate as well^

 

Not really as of yet, I was under the impression that 2 x 680's will generally outperform a 690 and it is slightly cheaper anyway. Am I missing some benefit of the 690?

According to this:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/585?vs=586
680SLI mostly gets an edge in frame rates but suffers slightly worse load noise,power & temperature levels.

 

I just figure that the performance is so close, it might be nicer to go with the neater setup.

690 also looks really amazing aesthetically

 

So if this is the case what am I going to need PSU wise for 2 x 680's overclocked CPU etc? Would this Corsair AX1200 be overkill?

And any other opinions regarding keeping the old i5-750 (@3.6GHz) for a while rather than upgrading straight away?

From what I've gathered The GPU is much more likely to be a bottleneck than a CPU of this caliber for gaming, but i could be wrong.

 

The thing is, correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember reading that the 690 hasn't been fully optimized yet - you'd see it's true potential in a years time, I'd think.

 

Wow everybody likes spending your money.

Buy a 27" 2560x1440 screen and a single GTX 680 (not even the 4GB model) - this will happily run BF3 on Ultra. If you feel like it, you can add another in SLi later. This then means your 650W PSU is fine, as long as it is from a good make.

 

Once you run out of Vram then the PCIe bandwidth comes into play as it swaps data between the video and system ram. Some people have reported smoother gameplay with BF3 when running a single 1GB card @16x (PCIe 2.0) than when 2 cards are in place. I had similar issues when playing GTAIV with 512MB cards.

A 690 would alleviate this as the data would only need to be sent to the card once, and split across the GPU's once it got there.

As a guideline my rig pulls 242w from the wall when just running Prime64, that's about 222w at 92% actually going into the PC. Each 680 is rated at 195w max, so if you round the 222 to 250 for overhead like extra drives, fans, USB devices etc than with the SLI route you are looking at needing 650w bare minimum.

Most PSU's are more efficient and last longer if they are running somewhere between the 40-60% mark, but bear in mind that when gaming it will be nowhere near it's max, especially if you use Vsync.
For instance my rig uses nearly 100w less when gaming than what it's crunching Prime64 and Furmark.

A 690 would only use 300W max so the bare minimum would be 550.

 

Hmm, I think I am going to stick with the U3011 (I know it is very expensive but I just want it so bad) but just get 1 680 and stick with my current CPU/MoBo/PSU for the moment.

Hopefully I'll have enough money to upgrade CPU/MoBo add a 2nd 680, upgrade PSU and add 2 Dell 2007FP's to create a triple monitor setup at some point in future.

 

Can't say I've tested it myself but you really don't want to be running a PSU at anywhere near max load for extended periods, myself I'd like to run mine about 50% load or thereabouts. More efficient, quiet, cool and will last a long time

 

I have a fairly similar spec. I am definitely waiting for haswell for an entire upgrade. I went with a new display, and will be going for a 670 as soon as I can afford it only because I don't think I will be happy with the 560ti 1GB I have now at 1440p. So basically since you don't have an ssd that is a good call, and I would go for the larger drive as speed is unnoticeable outside of benchmarking. Since you can afford it go for the 680 if you like, but only one.
If you still feel like spending more I don't see a sound card listed, so perhaps that, some nice cans or speaker upgrade to some proper hi-fi kit. Normally I would recommend a good keyboard, but I see you already had sense enough to do that.

 

That's why I wrote this:

 

average of 61? I doubt it. Max maybe. Besides, it's the lowest you need to keep your eyes on, and I've seen it as low as 32 approx on mine here, and the average will be in the low 40s with 1x 670. I now have 2x, and that's about right.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/07/31/gainward-geforce-gtx-670-2gb-phantom/4

My findings concur with that.


As for that PSU it will be on the limit.

 

Would you mind actually giving any sort of argument for that? I'm never afraid to admit I'm wrong but you better actually have some evidence of it before you tell someone to ignore an entire post like that.

Sounds like a reasonable analysis, but that could accredited to a bad crossfire/sli profile for the game, perhaps things have changed since this was written, but I have no reason to assume they have http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-crossfire-nvidia-sli-multi-gpu,2678-5.html

jammy, please don't discount all that advice I gave you just because someone dropped a dismissive 1 liner. I've been designing systems professionally for years and I gave good reason for every suggestion I made.

 

For reference I run a faster CPU (i7950 at 4.4ghz) and 2 680s in sli on a 750 watt psu it nearly draws 500 watts under full load. So the 1kw + recom are insane overkill.

The monitor you picked is best in class and I would recommend it as would multiple people on this forum. ( I use it for my 680sli)

Your CPU once overclocked won't hold you back.

Corsair hx850 or 750 would do you fine power wise.

Rest of what you linked is fine and people who say 2 680 is overkill have not pushed crysis 2 to max with its texture Addons, as even 2 680s struggles to maintain 60fps.

Next gpu series is a long way away as well.

 

These tests were done on a GTX280 with 1GB of Vram which was pretty much the max at the time so the games weren't limited but the amount of Ram.

If they had tested a game that used 1GB on a card with only 512MB (that could be run on a single card) they would have seen smoother performance with 1 16x lane than 2 8x lanes. I've tested this myself with GTAIV, I could get smoother gameplay at higher settings with only 1 card in, SLI profile was fine at lower settings.

It won't be so much of an issue with PCIe3 and 2GB is enough for full detail in most games (rage being the only exception) nowadays, but you never know what the future may hold.

 

I'm already thinking along these lines, but have been researching round head-fi etc for this. I have ordered Denon AH-D7000's and a FiiO E17 for iphone/laptop listening. I'll be getting a DAC/AMP also so no need for soundcard since I'll just be using SPDIF output on onboard card. Still completely undecided on speakers though.

I won't be completely disregarding anything in this thread without a well put rebuttal or evidence to the contrary. Anyways, I think a bunch of varying views are a good thing for me, it's nice to see a spectrum of opinions.

I've actually now gone ahead and ordered the monitor, it was my most definite pick from the beginning to be honest, it was going to take one hell of an argument to dissuade me.

And it's nice to hear that my CPU should be able to hold me over for a bit longer without too much hassle.

Regarding this and other posts re: 680 vs 680SLI it seems that there is no overall concensus yet. I think I will order just 1 and as soon as I start noticing games that are struggling I will spring for the 2nd and an upgraded PSU. Can't do any harm in waiting a little longer if it's not quite powerful enough and I might save myself a decent bit of cash if it turns out 1 is enough for the stuff I'm playing.

 

The none definite conclusion is because 80% of comes don't own sli 680s and are just reading reviews with benchmarks. True gamer ran his own benchmarks that prove why you may want the sli, he is one of several people on this forum who owns them. ( search 2gb 680s vs 4gb 680s has enough benchmarks )