I got everything put together and running. I took some pictures. I am trying to think of what else to add to my new build. I just need some ideas on what else to buy while I am still in a buying mood. I generally only upgrade once a year in October, so I must get ideas before it is too late and I consider it a waste of money. I do plan to overclock the CPU to 5 GHz and run both video cards at 6970 stock speeds. Everything but the 6950, monitors, accessories, and old hard drives arrive tomorrow. So far I have Graphics cards: AMD XFX 6950 flashed to 6970 AMD Powercolor 6970 Case: LIAN LI PC-A71F RAM: 16 GB DDR 3 SSD: Crucial M4 128GB MB: ASRock P67 Extreme4 (B3) CPU: i7 2700k HSF: Noctura D14 with AS5 Optical: LG Black super multi sata bluray burner PSU: Corsair 850TX 850 Watt Sound: Sound blaster X-Fi titanium HDs: Old hard drives including a 40GB SSD Controller: Sunbeam PL-RS-6 Fan Controller Monitors: Dell U3011 Dell 2209WA Dell 2209WA Accessories: Keyboard: Logitech G11 Mouse: Logitech G5 Headphones: Sennheiser HD650 with FiiO E9 amplifier Ratpadz mousepad
2500k instead of the 2700k, unless your doing heavy production work would be a waste of money. even then, i still would consider it a waste of money unless production was your main use for this rig, not a seconary so would 16gb of ram, again unless your doing heavy production work good choice on the headset, too bad that sound card doesnt have an amp, so you wont be getting the full sound out of that headset. it requires an amp. so either get an external amp, or switch that to an asus xonar st/x since they have an amp thats built in that can drive that headset. i personally dont see a use for a blu-ray burner, just another waste of money as for the ssd, do you mean the crucial m4? if so then, good. otherwise get the crucial m4, stay away from corsairs ssds, as they use the 2nd gen sandforce controller that has issues.
I actually already purchased everything. It is being shipped. I forgot to add, I do have a good amp. Also, I did mean crucial m4. I read reviews extensively before choosing it. I will edit the post. I am looking more for stuff to add to my current build to make it perfect.
Looks good, all high-end, except it appears you went cheap on the motherboard. I would ask why you went with a P67 rather than a third generation Z68 motherboard? Will that motherboard support Ivy Bridge?
That's a pretty badass PC. I'm curious what you use it for, that you need hyperthreading and 16GB RAM? Overall it looks nice but I would've gone with a Z68 chipset Asus board for such a high end build.
I play just about every PC game out there. I also 6 box in some MMOs on occasion. Firefox uses 1.5 GB of RAM since I have it auto refreshing pages. I've found that 8 GB is not enough. 8 GB of faster speed DDR3 is only 50 dollars, so I went for 16. All I hope is that I can run Crysis. Right now with a Q9550 at 3.6 ghz, one 6950 @ 6970, 8 gb of ram, I cannot. Not at 2560 x 1600 res. I've been waiting to buy this build since January. Running my own business, I had to keep the money in the business until the end of the year, so it was very hard waiting this long. Either way, it worked out for the best. I now can have my dream build (sorta).
What wasn't 8GB enough for? Firefox on its own uses about 300mb RAM [edit: that is with a few plugins]. Auto-refresh may increase memory use a bit, but it won't suddenly make FF hog up 1.5GB of RAM. That said, RAM is cheap atm, not a big deal. Btw you should use the NT-H1 thermal compound that comes with Noctua NH-D14, it's better than AS5 and doesn't need a 200h curing time.
I'm glad you could fulfill your dream and I hope you enjoy your new build ! Anyway, I know Crysis 1 is quite demanding at high resolutions but there are some tweaks out there that can improve image quality and at the same time improve framerates. In crysis 1 and crysis 2 never got past the 2.5gb mark at 1920x1080 in my rig so I believe it's more of VRAM what you need and not actual RAM. you need 2gb or 3gb version of the vga's in crossfire or SLI for maximum scaling and performace when using multiple monitor setups and extreme high resolutions.
I'm being generous here sharing this with you: http://www.mediafire.com/?kucv7caiu4kg117 It's Firefox tune (it is a discontinued freeware) that's made to improve memory allocation from firefox. It also improves speed, response, opening time and management... with that, even at highest settings, firefox never goes up the 350mb of ram, with movies loaded, many tabs opens, flash and so on. Even so, who would be so stupid and play a massive game like Crysis1/2 and leave resourse consuming apps open?? Dude, even better, use the Game Booster app, it disables almost everything running in background and improves gaming performance. (something like the AMD fusion app)
game booster has a tendency to disable/close necessary windows programs that you need for full use/compatibility. you can manually do everything game booster does for you. that and windows 7 has great resource management and you'll never really need to do that stuff. edit - and to the op, id add a really bitching comfy chair and a mini fridge. your not going anywhere for a while once you sit down in front of that rig
I agree with you, I must add that the pc where i used that soft was using windows XP ^^ It actually worked for me ^^ But with a quad core nowadays its actually hard for the os to use many of the cpu resources... plus, gaming wise, most games use 1 or 2 threads, except for latest games that may use up to 4 or 6
Everything runs well now mostly. For some reason, Metro 2033 only gets 20-30 FPS at the start where you first start to go outside. I use this room in the game as a benchmark. I am getting the same FPS I was getting before the upgrade. Also, I did have two 6950s at one time and it did perform much better. Both GPUs were pulling 100%. Battlefield 3 runs great. Never below 30 FPS on 64 player maps at 2560 x 1600 resolution with everything maxed. For overclocking, I am just using 4.4GHz on auto settings. I really don't feel like being a guinea pig, so I will wait for more results before going to 5GHz.
BF3 was quite well optimized. Metro 2033, updated? downloaded the latest catalyst profiles? BTW, very nice build, though I must add you need some serious cable management right there