I'm going to echo what Napoleon said and say just get the 1600. I have the same basic setup (i7-2600k, 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600, P8P67 Deluxe) and I have yet to have any performance issues with anything. After setting up the BIOS so the RAM is actually running at 1600, the CPU gets overclocking to 4.3 GHz, too. Seeing as it's the one I have, I'm rather partial to the Deluxe, but anything in the P8P67 line is good. You just need to determine what your connectivity needs are, since I'm pretty sure that's the only thing that sets the different P8P67 models apart.

Thank you everyone for your advice! I just went to Sim Lim (the biggest local PC parts place) and I bought my brand new desktop on Saturday. Here are it's parts and costs for your information:

CPU:
Intel i5 2500K 3.3Ghz LGA1155
$ Together with Motherboard

Motherboard:
Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3
$498 (Together with CPU)

GPU:
Asus GTX570 Directcu II 1280MB DDR5 OC
$499

RAM:
Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz CL8 8GB kit (2x 4GB)
$139

SSD:
OCZ 120GB MAX IOPS Vertex 3 SATA3
$399

HDD:
Western Digital 1TB 64MB (Caviar Black)
$118

PSU:
XfX 750W Modular 80+ Silver
$179

CPU Heatsink:
CoolerMaster TX3 CPU Cooler
$39

Casing:
Cooler Master 690 II (Basic) 2 Fans + Side Window
$109

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit OEM
$115

Assembly: $10

TOTAL COST: SGD$2105
or approx USD$1755 (assuming USD/SGD 1.2)

Notes:
- No DVD/CD Writer was included as I had salvaged the old one from the old CPU. But even a new one would have been a minor cost (~$25)
- Ditto for the monitor, speakers, keyboard/mouse
- Prices listed excludes discounts, I got some small discounts here and there
- If anyone wants to purchase an OCZ SSD, do read up on the reviews on Neweggs and other websites detailing problems with bluescreens/repeated reboots. I am happy to report that I am not having any such problems so far in 4 days of continuous operation
- I had wanted to get a Cooler Master PSU, but the shop was out of stock, I was recommended the XFX PSU so I took that one.
- The Asus Video Card is HUGE! The damn thing looks like a mini motherboard. It is so heavy that the corner of the card furthest away from the PCI connector and casing screws sags downwards to a noticable degree! We had to jury rig some cables inside the casing to keep the thing supported. I don't think allowing it to sag is a good idea, especially in the long run.

Performance:
Benchmark:
- Scored 21000+ on 3DMark Vantage
- Averaged 60FPS on Furmark's standard test, but with an alarming spike in GPU temperature to 70 degrees celsius. I won't be repeating that test again!

Anecdotal:
- Running all games very smoothly so far. Only noted aberration was with World of Tanks (when I bumped all settings to max, I couldn't see any tanks)
- I have kept my computer running continuously for the past few days to stress test it (especially for warranty/returns purposes) and CPU & GPU temperatures are often 30-40 degrees when idling or under normal work load. Ambient temperature is 26 - 33 degrees, so it's not much above ambient

Does anyone have any other benchmarks to recommend? I'd let to get some figures recorded down.

Welcome to three years ago (The GTX 200 series were basically the first of the dual-slot 10.5 inch long monster cards to be fairly standard, IIRC, though there were other dual-slot custom coolers in the 8000 series before them). The card will be fine if you just let it sag; it's basically designed to do that, since there's no real way around it in most cases.

Your card can take 90+ C easily. If you had let Furmark run, it would have hit a steady state probably in the 95-ish range. 70 C is nothing under load (my 6970's hit that or more when playing games easy), and will not hurt your card in the slightest. Just make sure it isn't idling that high (sounds like it isn't; 40-50 C is a fine idle temp).

As for benchmarks, they won't tell you a whole lot about the actual performance you'll see, and are really mostly for enlarging your e-peen. Try playing some games and dick around with the settings until you find ones that run nicely (if you're at 1920x1200 or below, you should be pumping max settings in just about everything).

Hi starslayer,

About the sagging cards, do you have any links or articles which indicate that the cards are designed to sag and be okay? I tried looking for information on sagging cards but haven't been able to find any besides forum posts of people worried about it. Most people seem to jury rig something and I saw suggestions for everything from duct tape, wooden dowels and zip tie to ninja cable.

Temperature wise, you're right, and temperature tests seem to support the 90 C threshold. Perhaps I'll try to run a furmark stability test to make sure it can survive at that temperature at least for a while.

Well, what better time is there to benchmark after getting a new computer? It does make the hole in the wallet feel more worthwhile.

The new rig will, in the end be:

i5 2500K (3.3Ghz).
Scythe Katana Cooler
Asus P8 Z-68 VLE Motherboard.
2x4 GB DDR3 1333 Mhz RAM (G.Skill)

SSD: Patriot Pyro 60GB SATA III
HD: WD Caviar Green 3TB SATA III

GPU: (Man, prices in Israel suck) - Radeon 6850 1GB
PSU Seasonic 520W
Mouse and keyboard - Logitech MK120 or MK 520.
Windows 7.

Total cost (including 101$ for Windows and VAT): 1,529 $ . (Ouch).
Woot .

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Photography
Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Probably going to have to upgrade my graphics card soon and thought I might as well check to see if it's worth just getting a new system entirely.
Currently I have:

Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40Ghz
4GB RAM
NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS (The lower end 2006 version, not the 2007 one)

If there's some way to figure out what motherboard and what sort of RAM I have without having to open up the case that'd be useful for me to know, as the device manager doesn't seem to show those.

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Ph34r teh eyebrow!!11!Writers Guild Sluggite Pawn of Chaos WYGIWYGAINGW so now i have to put ACPATHNTDWATGODW in my sig EBC-Honorary Geordie
Hammerman! Hammer!

... They forgot to put the HD inside. Idiots.
Israelis, Beware KSP (Great price, but when people say the service sucks, they aren't joking!)

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Photography
Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

You will need to crack the case. Both the RAM and mobo should have the info you need printed in prominent places.

No, I do not. However, many of these cards have some kind of backplate which is fairly rigid and thus the card doesn't flex too badly; even if they don't, it's rare for the sag to be any kind of problem unless you have those screwless expansion brackets. Making sure the card is securely screwed into the expansion bracket should be all you need to do.

Yes, I keep my card securely screwed into the brackets. Thanks.

Nifty, so the more informative specs are:

Windows 7
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40Ghz
4GB DDR2 RAM
NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS (640MB Memory)
ASUS P5KC motherboard

As far as I can gather from looking at system requirments for upcoming games a quad core and 4GB of RAM are still good but I'm starting to see NVida Geforce 8 series creeping into minimum requirements. So:

1) Just how soon will I need to upgrade my graphics card?
2) To upgrade the card to something worthwhile will I need to get a new motherboard? Going by the CPU-Z program the board will support a card with (no idea what these mean) PCI-Express and max link width of x16.

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Ph34r teh eyebrow!!11!Writers Guild Sluggite Pawn of Chaos WYGIWYGAINGW so now i have to put ACPATHNTDWATGODW in my sig EBC-Honorary Geordie
Hammerman! Hammer!

Nope. PCI-E 2.0 cards (every modern card) will work in any PCI-E x16 slot. You will probably need a new card in the next six months, and definitely in the next year to meet minimum requirements. I recall some games requiring at least an 8800 GT (a better card than yours) already.

I am looking to replace my XFX HD4850 (1 gig vram) with a GT430 (with 2gb vram).

Mostly because the 4850 has some bugs that keep popping up in various games, both old and new.

Question: would it be worth it (is there a significant enough performance difference?)? If so, my favourite shop has the card from two manufacturers: Point of View and Zotac. Any word of which is better or more worthwhile to get?

Decided to get an entirely new PC, as the old one was getting inadequate for more than a few things, and there are older machines in the house which it needs to replace.

Considering this for new PC build for LANing, playing BF3, photo editing, some virtualization stuff, and photo editing. Not overclocking, I don't really feel like dicking around in my BIOS anymore, and my coursework makes me feel a tad less comfortable w/ overclocking.even though there probably is really enough margin to do so safely. I want the VT-D support so that excludes the overclockable K processors anyway.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005C8 ... PDKIKX0DER - Radeon 8470
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813121515 - Motherboard - seems to be the only mATX board out there w/ a Q67 chipset which has VT-D support
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817341016 - PSU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115073 - CPU, i5 2500 non-K for VT-D support
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148347 - 8 gigs of DDR-1333 , not overclocking
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136471 - Hard drive - externals are cheaper by a significant margin at this point. Would I be better off waiting 4-6 months for hard drive prices to come down post-flooding? I do have spare capacity on my fileserver which might around that long. Also, would getting a small sub100$ SSD and leaving only WIndows (and everything but /home on Linux) and dumping everything else on a hard drive be worthwhile?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6826249065 - Steelseries mouse- current Logitech one exhibiting weird debouncing (well, lack thereof) issues.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811163112 - Case - Seems to be rather difficult to find cheap shoebox form factor cases (thinking about getting a crappy case and modding/painting) and the nice Lian Li ones have awkward port placements.

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ah.....the path to happiness is revision of dreams and not fulfillment... -SWPIGWANG
Sufficient Googling is indistinguishable from knowledge -somebody
Anything worth the cost of a missile, which can be located on the battlefield, will be shot at with missiles. If the US military is involved, then things, which are not worth the cost if a missile will also be shot at with missiles. -Sea Skimmer


George Bush makes freedom sound like a giant robot that breaks down a lot. -Darth Raptor

Bah, can't edit after timeout. I'm considering swapping the Q67 motherboard for a Z68 chip, if Intel's SSD caching is worthwhile though, since currently VT-D isn't really useful for running Windows alongside Linux (considering running Linux in a VM on Windows instead of vice-versa, even though the former is more frequently used), and if I'm doing that, I might as well get the 2500K instead. [EDIT, nevermind, "smart response" isn't a real hardware feature anyway, just something like Intel fakeraid]

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ah.....the path to happiness is revision of dreams and not fulfillment... -SWPIGWANG
Sufficient Googling is indistinguishable from knowledge -somebody
Anything worth the cost of a missile, which can be located on the battlefield, will be shot at with missiles. If the US military is involved, then things, which are not worth the cost if a missile will also be shot at with missiles. -Sea Skimmer


George Bush makes freedom sound like a giant robot that breaks down a lot. -Darth Raptor

The AMD 78x0 series will be released in late Feburary, which will have DirectX 11.1 support, VLIW4 (more efficient than VLIW5 on the 68x0 cards) and generally much better power/performance (due to the process transition from 40nm to 28nm). All the older stuff will be deeply discounted to clear. So unless you need it for Christmas gaming, might want to hold off a couple of months...

:\ - yeah, it is pretty much for Christmas gaming. I'll be too busy to do any kind of gaming once Feburary beings

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ah.....the path to happiness is revision of dreams and not fulfillment... -SWPIGWANG
Sufficient Googling is indistinguishable from knowledge -somebody
Anything worth the cost of a missile, which can be located on the battlefield, will be shot at with missiles. If the US military is involved, then things, which are not worth the cost if a missile will also be shot at with missiles. -Sea Skimmer


George Bush makes freedom sound like a giant robot that breaks down a lot. -Darth Raptor

:\ - yeah, it is pretty much for Christmas gaming. I'll be too busy to do any kind of gaming once Feburary beings

[EDIT] How do you delete posts? I keep double posting due to spurious double clicks caused by the aforementioned mouse bounce. [/EDIT]

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ah.....the path to happiness is revision of dreams and not fulfillment... -SWPIGWANG
Sufficient Googling is indistinguishable from knowledge -somebody
Anything worth the cost of a missile, which can be located on the battlefield, will be shot at with missiles. If the US military is involved, then things, which are not worth the cost if a missile will also be shot at with missiles. -Sea Skimmer


George Bush makes freedom sound like a giant robot that breaks down a lot. -Darth Raptor

Changed out parts, decided was going to overclock after all and dropped the VT-D requirement. How's this?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005C8 ... PDKIKX0DER - Radeon 6870 graphics (Already purchased)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005JW ... PDKIKX0DER - FT03 Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817341016 - PSU - moved up to a 550watt model to give it a bit more margin, since it doesn't cost much more after rebate and various power calculators indicated I'd be cutting it close if I decided to do a bit of expansion.
Hard drive- reusing current 500GB 5400RPM one until prices fall
2x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148347 - 16GB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6826249065 - Mouse
Keyboard - swapping out KBC poker w/ cherry blues for my cherry brown Filco
http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... id=0347893 - Spire Thermax Eclipse II HSF
http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... id=0354589 - 2600k CPU
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00558 ... PDKIKX0DER - Asus Gene-Z Mobo

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ah.....the path to happiness is revision of dreams and not fulfillment... -SWPIGWANG
Sufficient Googling is indistinguishable from knowledge -somebody
Anything worth the cost of a missile, which can be located on the battlefield, will be shot at with missiles. If the US military is involved, then things, which are not worth the cost if a missile will also be shot at with missiles. -Sea Skimmer


George Bush makes freedom sound like a giant robot that breaks down a lot. -Darth Raptor

Man, you should've gotten the stuff during Black Friday/Cyber Monday. The 2500k was going for $150 at Microcenter and comboing it with a Z68 mobo was another $60 off.

Your links aren't working. Recommend the 2500k over the 2600k - hyperthreading really isn't worth the price increase and overclocking will put the two very close in performance anyways.

Don't know what sort of expansion you have in mind, but 550W might not cut it if you add another video card.

Mice is very much personal preference, but I hardly see any competitive FPS players using the Ikari. Just an FYI.

So, I bought and built a computer back in October 2009, and it's running great except for the fact that it tends to overheat these days under any kind of significant load (like gaming). Now, I know part of the problem is that I need to clean out the dust, but since the source of the problem seems to be CPU cooling, it seems like an aftermarket CPU cooler would be a good investment rather than a stock cooler, right?

Does anyone have recommendations as to which CPU fan I should get? I'd prefer quiet, but this box isn't exactly whisper quiet anyway, so I'd settle for effective. EDIT: Budget is ~$75 USD, but I'm flexible.

Also, where and when should my next upgrade be? SSD? Video card? Now? 6 months?

I'm currently dual-booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04.

I ended up w/ this as my final build:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic. ... #p22418574





Went w/ the 2600k anyway since it was on sale w/ a motherboard purchase. Overclock is kinda crappy at "only" 4.429GHz, given the heatsink - stock HSF is only 100Mhz below that, at +.06V to the voltage offset. Not really willing to punch in more to get higher than that. Wondering if I should bother w/ a case fan upgrade- I have two 60CFM 1600RPM Scythe Minebea fans lying around, but they need a speed controller, since just one of them screams compared to the stock fans- the current setup seems slightly starved of air, esp since I had to remove the middle 120mm fan to fit the CPU cooler, which probably also has the effect of removing positive pressure. Temps do seem okay hovering around 60ish under load though. Using only a 600W PSU since not intending to SLI.

The best air cooler that's quiet is probably the Thermalright Archon, if you have the space for it (170mm tall, and quite wide too) or the Silver Arrow (163mm, what I'm using due to a max clearance of 167mm). Both ~75-80$ish . There are cheaper options such as the thermaltake frio and hyper212 if you don't care about noise/few degrees C difference .


As for next upgrade, FWIW I'm still using a 5400RPM 500GB hard drive... although the 16GB of RAM caching everything helps.

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ah.....the path to happiness is revision of dreams and not fulfillment... -SWPIGWANG
Sufficient Googling is indistinguishable from knowledge -somebody
Anything worth the cost of a missile, which can be located on the battlefield, will be shot at with missiles. If the US military is involved, then things, which are not worth the cost if a missile will also be shot at with missiles. -Sea Skimmer


George Bush makes freedom sound like a giant robot that breaks down a lot. -Darth Raptor

I have ordered a pair of mildly overclocked Radeon 7970s, mostly because I'm very curious how the GCN architecture handles my GPGPU AI codes (commercial and research). The 58xx and 69xx series had compelling theoretical performance but a combination of numerous serious ongoing driver deficiencies and poor branch and scalar performance meant that I ended up going with Nvidia for the GPUs in my workstation and the recent pair of compute servers. I'm cautiously optimistic that GCN will put AMD in the lead for real-world GPGPU performance. I use gaming cards because for Bayesian induction and modelling it's much cheaper to do a mass of single precision exploration and then verify interesting cases with double precision + multiple runs, versus relying solely on DP & ECC for reliability (on Tesla/Firestream cards).

For my desktop.

CPU - Intel core i7 2600 3.4Ghz 8 Mb Cache Sandy Bridge
CPU cooler - Corsair H70 water cooler
Motherboard Asrock z68 extreme
memory - 8GB dual DDR3 1600 Mhz
SDD - 120 GB corsair force 3
HDD - 500 GB Seagate SATA 16 Mb cache
video card - Geforce GTX550ti 1Gb

Monitor - Acer 22" V223HQbd LED
DVD writer - Samsung 22x SATA DVD writer
Case - coolermaster silencio 550 soundproofed super silent case
Power - Antec true power 3.0 550W

All this plus keyboard, mouse, windows 7 home premium 64 bit, and microsoft office 2010 Home and student (word, excel, power point, one note) and warranty comes to $1779 AUD or around $1900 USD. Mainly plan to use it for multimedia purposes like watch videos, maybe a bit of video editing, read PDF and CBR files and the occasional gaming. What I want is to be able to run several applications simultaneously, so I am hoping the SSD, CPU and the RAM will help. Contrast to my current computer Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 CPU 2x6Mb 2.83G , Memory - 4GB DDR2 1066 memory kingston, video card - GeForc 9800 GT 512 Mb DDR3 and of course, no SSD.

I have already brought speakers separately last month for my current computer (I used to listen by putting on earphones) so price not included in this build. I also store most of my files (a bit more than 1 TB) on a 3TB portable Hard Drive with USB 3.0, so there is no need for a large HDD. My new computer is USB 3.0 capable.

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Master : Do you know who your parents are?
Hero : Aren’t I an orphan?
Master : No. <Insert details here>. BTW, your parents were killed by the Master of the girl you like. So you can’t marry her now.
Hero : Noooo
I describe this as soap opera with Chinese characteristics and I love it.

Saying that you'll have no problem multitasking with that build would be the understatement of the year. You've got the 'occasional gaming' thing licked, too. Your rig is roughly equal to mine (same proc, Asus P8P67 Deluxe mobo, 16GB RAM, GTX 560 Ti, no SSD), and I run most games smoothly at High or Ultra settings at 1080p.