Asus direct cu II if you have the room in your pc case(3 slots)... otherwise it's costly and ofc good :)

I wholeheartedly disagree with this choice. But let me tell you why.
1 - custom graphic cards with custom clocks models are more willing to fail.
2 - This specific model had problem with thermal paste and wheight of the heatsink (i had one so i can comfirm what hardware website communities feedbacked)
3 - The price difference is totaly non justified.
4 - Asus graphics card have a very bad lifetime (i had 5 of them and they all failed within 6 months to 1.5 year max, yet they were all high end ones and were running 10hrs/day and never above 70 degrees C).

If you are going to buy a high end graphic card i would advise you to either aim for stock models from any compagnies or EVGA hydro models if you want that +10% perf gain.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php...amp;tool=3

2x8 ram

The i7-3770 benchmarks for the price are quite impressive so will pick that over a xeon.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php...amp;tool=3

but now face a dilemma as the I5 3570 is at least £70 cheaper and offers the same performance in gaming as the 3770 (only video editing warrants the 3770s price)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php...amp;tool=3

thoughts?


what graphics card do you recommend then z3ro bearing in mind I like value and performance!

You're choosing an lga1155 processor for lga1156 motherboard lol...

Get 3570K
Get random z77 motherboard = easy cpu overclock = no need to upgrade for 5 years
Keep old ram(or if it's 4gb or less add up the same ram to 8gb), it doesnt rly influence perfomance
Spend all other money on gfx card

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HT doesnt really give perfomance boost worth 100 euro difference between 3570K and 3770K... Even in heavy multithreaded apps like video-encoding ones it's a couple % at max. And turning it off lowers the temperature by quite a lot which lets you overclock it by a few hundred mhz more giving MUCH bigger perfomance boost than having HT on at lower frequency.
For 100e difference you can rather afford buying 7970 instead of 7950 for example which is gonna be way more noticiable 10-20% FPS boost in games.

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1) assuming HT on/off temperature difference it's much more significant for Ivy when overclocking comparing to Sandy.
2) stock speeds are enough today, but we aren't talking about today only, are we? Overclocking can easily postpone next upgrade by 1-2 years. Why not to do that? But tbh there's never `enough` :D
3) yes, multithreading becomes more and more important over years, but HT doesn't really fucking boost multithreading perfomance. And in most typical use cases it even slows it down. Useless marketing feature. And so far I haven't rly seen a single game where 6core CPU would be more dominant than 4core one. And I'm not even talking about non-existent HT perfomance difference here ;o
4) this is ESR and not 'what pc do i get to run call of duty black ops 15 on my new 4096 x 3072 display 30fps stable' club. People usually want their new PCs to run games at 120+ fps here using CRT or fullhd 120hz monitors at max. And high framerates are mostly determined by high singlethread perfomance & gfx card.

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the fps/perfomance boost after overclocking is still pretty close to linear in those games/apps where you aren't bottlenecked by gfx card...
HT 20-30% lol please, if only all programmers suddenly turn into Johns Carmacs and spend 100 years re-thinking all the algorithms in the world.

I just bought this yesterday. =)

http://www.ple.com.au/ViewWishlist.aspx?Wishl...1aaa2250f5

thanks for your replies guy's greatly appreciated!