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Jumping the Sandy Bridge bandwagon

M

martixy

Member
This is gonna be a repost of another thread which I happened to accidentally post in the wrong section of the forums.
It has gotten no replies in the significant time(well, almost a day) it's been up so I'll take a gamble and repost it here in the hopes I do get some input. I hope you guys don't mind.

Ok... holidays approaching.

And as much as I am loath to follow in the footsteps of your regular Joe Nobody or his soccer mom and shop during the holidays, this particular one happens to present a LONG overdue opportunity to FINALLY jump on the Sandy Bridge bandwagon. I've been putting that off for far too long.

Now. I've already done a bit of research.
I'm kind of a Power-Power User. Here's the component ranges and example components I've come up till now:
Core i7 2600K - best cost/oomph ratio CPU still, no need to mess with what ain't broken.

A CoolerMaster Hyper TX3 or Hyper 212 Plus cooler
I want to do light overclocking, just to jump the 4GHz point, nothing fancy. Best if that happens Turbo-less, but even only Turbo >4GHz isn't that big of a loss. I'm a complete "noob" on overclocking though.

SSD:
A Corsair F series SSD - 60-120G, but nothing that costs more than that. I'd prefer a Sand Force drive. Feel free to theorize here.

MotherBoard:
Asus P8P67 PRO or Asus P8P67 LE.
In that particular pair I've seen the pro heavily recommended, though I can't recall why now.
Scratch that, see below.
After further reading I am strongly leaning towards a good Z68 board. I don't want to give up such a prominent feature of my CPU just for a few bucks in MoBo savings(if that's what it's about). Even more SRT seems like the major deal here - especially considering Anand's very own review of the feature and considering my own assessment of my typical usage model. RST is also nice, since I run my own RAID even now.

GPU:
An nVidia GTX560/570 GPU.
On that there are so many manufacturers and price variations I have no idea what to do.
You could suggest another GPU altogether, provided that you state a compelling reason. I do want however compute power(openCL/CUDA). That's one thing that has to stay strong in the build.
I wanna play today's games reasonably(1920x1080) and be sure I can run anything new in the next 2-3 years as well.

Memory:
At least 8GB, other than that no idea. I was thinking of cutting corners here. How much that is advisable you guys tell me.

PSU:
500W enough? I want a 80Plus PSU, that's for sure.

Case:
Cooler Master HAF-912 Plus OR I have one other unused case here which I may put to use, if it can fit everything.

HDD:
For this one I'm not sure if I'll be buying one of those. I kinda already have enough.
Feel free to suggest good deals though, I'm open to the idea of a multimedia storage drive.

And keep in mind I'm in Europe!
Total budget's about 1000-1200 EU.

I am also not above the idea of skipping the holiday madness and waiting till end-Jan to mid-Feb to do the shopping in case there is a solid reason for it. Like upcoming changes or shifts in the market or whatever. I even have no idea what holidays do to the market, since I'm not a big fan of the holiday shopping rushes.
Any input greatly appreciated.
 
can you atleast fill out the sticky?

and come back and post when you are about a week away from when youre building.
 
All the information from the sticky is there. It's just not jumping in your face. And I am a week from building. I just said I don't mind postponing in case there's a good reason for it.

If you are referring to the vague usage definition. I can list uses, or I can just say everything.
I will use it for: browsing, office work, games, multimedia consumption, software development, heavy multithreaded workloads. Well if that doesn't cover about 90% of what PC's are used for it's because I ran out of ideas. So as I said - power-power user.
 
I would help if you could be more specific about your applications. In particular, the i7 and Nvidia card CUDA are highly situational choices. Many people think that they need those, but their bottleneck is really elsewhere. In particular, I am having a hard time thinking of a workload where the i7 2600K is the best bang for the buck (euro?).

Also, it would be helpful if you could elaborate on why you think that a Sandforce drive would be best for you. Generally speaking, a Marvell-based drive like a Crucial M4 or Intel 510 will be faster in everything except for synthetic workloads.
 
Well since this will be my first foray into SSD's I have no idea what works and what does not. Which is why I am asking.
The SF mention comes from the fact that what I've read on this site, to the extent I have understood it, seems to suggest that such a drive seems to be the best solution.

Next, I was comparing i7 to the new Sandy Bridge-E when I said that. Short of one of those I feel that's the best performance I can get for the least amount of money.
As for CUDA, I'm really looking to seriously get into GPU computing. I know you can do openCL on ATI cards but I feel CUDA is the more mature platform and it's also one more than the single option you get on ATI cards. So I wanna have those options - hence the restriction of an nVidia card, and also one that's reasonably powerful as well. You can consider me an nVidia fanboy on that note if you will.
 
OK, so I have three suggestions in that case:
- Get a Crucial M4 or Samsung 830. They are just as fast and more reliable than Sandforce.
- Get an i5 2500K. It is about 2/3rd the cost of the i7 2600K and will perform within a few percent in all but the most heavily-threaded workloads.
- Get a GTX 560 Ti 448 or GTX 570 (NOT a GTX 560 Ti). The GF110 chips have the full GPGPU capabilities unlocked and will translate well to a high-end Quadro or Tesla card. You will want a 600-700W PSU for either of those cards.
 
I see. All of those make pretty compelling points.
To tell the truth I do sort of have this irrational fixation on i7, so we shall see if my budget will allow this or force me back to reality.

SSD - Good suggestion, it looks like a great drive. The article here hinted at some problems, but they seem to have been resolved in a firmware update.

And thanks for the GPU tip!
 
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