New gaming build ideas? - Page 3

Originally Posted by alcal 

Not sure how you got talked into SLI 670's. I would definitely recommend 7970's as they are often 20% better and scale better at higher resolutions (which you will be using). They can he had for around 430 from newegg (such as the HIS ICEQ one),
The sabertooth is a great board that lots of people love, although I think you could squeeze an OC out of your current Asus, but I can understand Sata3 being a big draw so the sabertooth is an ok investment.l
I personally plan on buying a crossover over the other korean monitors in the next month due to the significantly nicer build quality, although there are two caveats to that: 1) The dell 2713HM is coming out soon and may be at a decent price point for an actually warrantied product. 2) You have to make sure that the seller from whom you buy your crossover sends it with a 110v power brick. Some sellers are shipping them with 220v bricks.
8gb of ram is plenty. If you don't feel confident about that, load up as many programs as you regularly use on your current computer, go to the task manager>performance tab and see how much of your physical memory you are using. In most cases it's tough to cross 6gb for a standard user. However, corsair vengeance memory has lately become a bit of a joke, and although it looks pretty with those heatspreaders, it's basically ordinary ram clocked at 1600. Many forum users will recommend samsung ram (no heatspreaders but overclocks past 2k easily) or Gskill ripjaws which looks pretty and OC's decently

Originally Posted by Qu1ckset 

Lol I agree with the 6990 being loud and hot, that's the card I owned before my gtx 690, and if you want the 7970 but want quiet get the 7970 with the gigabyte windforce cooler .. but with my experiance with ati/amd there is always some stupid driver problem in some games, i don't even wanna get started about eyefinity, which is the reason I sold my 6990 and 3x 1080p monitors .. I've own plenty of ati/amd cards 2x 5770, 5970, 2x 5970, 6970, 6990 and I've owned a few nvidea cards 460, 465, 2x 580, and my current 690
Benches and actually gameplay are completely different
But in all fairness I haven't tried the 7970 in my personal computer but used in at my friends house and my coworkers... my one friend has the crossover and his 7970 runs fine as far as I seen and didn't see any problems in bf3. My coworkers running his 7970 on a 1080p screen and has problems running Mafia 2
The windforce cooler is pretty silent at 100% fans

Originally Posted by alcal 

I can't say for certain, because I don't own a 7000 series card (although I guess my 6990 is the worst of the worst in terms of power and heat) but the 7000 series hasn't had issues with power and heat relative to the 6000 and series from AMD and the 400 series from Nvidia. If heat concerns you, then grab a card with an aftermarket cooler such as the HIS ICEQ I mentioned. The 7970 just seems to me to be a MUCH better deal than any nvidia card on the market right now.
The 2500k is as good for gaming as the 3930k as additional cores/threads don't help games. Basically, I would recommend:
Sabertooth motherboard for extra PCIe slots and oc headroom
Noctua cooler for ocing the 2500k to 4.5 or so ghz
a single 7970
Crossover monitor
If the single 7970 doesn't cut it then add a second one, but even one will probably be ok. To put into perspective how good a single 7970 is, here is the anandbench page for your 6950 vs a 7970-- the 7970 is about twice as good in everything:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/510?vs=508
so if twice as much gpu power doesn't cut it, then you can just toss in another 7970 for about 4x power, since Crossfire scales almost 100% for dual cards XD