Hi just wondering what the general opinion is on socket 2011 pc's, is it worth buying a socket 2011 pc? Is Intel still the best make to buy for gaming or is AMD catching up now? What is the general opinion on the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 board? It looks good to me, dont really see the point in getting any more than 12 sata devices or more ram than 32GB either - is there any real reason to get a better board than the GA-X79-UD3? Seems there are only 2 socket 2011 CPU's available to this day which CPU is the best bang for buck?
There are three Intel LGA2011 cpus: Core I7-3960x Extreme Edition: 6 cores plus hyperthreading, 3.3GHz, 15Mb cache Core i7-3930K 6 cores plus hyperthreading, 3.2GHz, 12Mb cache Core i7-3820K 4 cores, 3.6GHz, 10Mb cache Take your pick.
For an i7-920 OC bought in June 2009, I do not personally consider new 39... series to be worth for me with a work in progress motherboard lacking native USB 3.0 and work in progress BIOS. For going with it, I need to spend close to US$900-1000 and for that amount, I will be going with Ivy Bridge CPU and chipsets for whatever they contain. I am looking at US$700-1000 for an Ivy Bridge CPU, good MB, and 8-12 GB RAM. Perhaps for people not on the previous i7 (eg core 2 duo, i3/i5), right now i7-2600K/2700K may be the best upgrade.
For me Ivybridge doesn't have anything compelling to upgrade. I already have a Quad-core, I want Octo-core to be my next upgrade. An 8 core desktop and 4 core laptop otherwise I won't spend any cash. The 8 core desktop processor must be in the 95 watt tdp and the laptop must be 25 watt tdp or no sale.
Already overclocked to 3.3-3.5 Ghz (lower at 3.3-3.4 Ghz in summers, and will go to 3.5 Ghz in the present winter till March). 100% stable, 24 hours on the upper 3.5GHz. This is on a decent aftermarket cooler. My MB, sabertooth x58 already has USB 3.0 (Renesas). It also has 2 Marvell SATA III controller ports, which I avoid having had BSODs when attaching the system hard disk to it. Do not know if it will give BSODs on data disks, but as I have 6 SATA II ports already on X58, I can avoid Marvell.