Thinking of Building Soon [Updated with pics]

ASUS is actually a lot better than Gigabyte, early on in socket 2011 GB had some serious issues with a couple of their boards. ASUS has the best engineering team of any consumer motherboard company I have seen, the tech in their boards and stability of the bios is just better.

Socket 2011 is actually supposed to be the high end socket, it is for people going with six core Intel processors or giant GPU setups, or people needing lots and LOTS of memory. I think socket 1155 is more what you are looking for Bishop. ALso you cant overclock that quad core processor, only the "K" series can be overclocked. ok, you can overclock a little bit. But not anything worthwhile, you can maybe get an extra 100-200MHz out of that quad core. The CPU is capable of so much more, Intel just locked down FSB changes to very specific sets with almost no deviation, so the only way to actually overclock is by multiplier. If you want socket 2011 and to overclock then you MUST get a 6-core K-series processor.



If I were you, I would get an i7-3770k and a Maximus V Gene or Sabertooth Z77 motherboard. If you want Gigabyte, probably want to go with the "UD5" for the Z77 chipset. So whatever model number that is.
Or if you dont want as many processing threads (25% more processing potential for multi-threaded apps with 3770k) you can step down to the 3570k. It saves a chunk of money that you can then put into top cooling, like the H100.

 

I always like upgrades
But if you can play all the games you want to in medium/high then you dont really NEED to upgrade. If you dont have the money readily available then just push it off, if you do have extra funds then figure out if you want to max out the graphics of all the games or if you are fine with the quality settings you have now. By max out I mean real top quality, 8x transparency multi-sampling anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. No matter what anyone says about "maxing out" their graphics, if you arent running those standard settings I just listed then you arent running "max" quality.

IF you want to upgrade then you should look into the GTX 670. The 660Ti cuts out a chunk of ROP's and memory bandwidth so the 670 makes a much better upgrade.

 

If you want Kingston RAM, I would go with this instead because of the 1.5v compatibility and faster speed:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104264


For a power supply, if you are going to stick with 1 GPU, an overclocked CPU, and a fewfans and hard drives then I would get this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182083
It is an above average PSU with a platinum certification. Not the best on the market, but if you want to step up to the better platinum models you need to put out another $50 for only some very small performance boosts.

If you are definitely going to get dual GPUs down the line then this is what I would get:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817256067

 

your right, the q9550 would not be able to feed the GPU with enough data to perform at its best. So the first thing you would need is a CPU/MB upgrade

 

Well the Sabertooth would support 1333, 1600, 1866, 2133, and should also have the option for 2400. Above that I doubt it has options for, you would be getting into ROG territory for those higher settings. That should cover anything you need though. Your not even getting anything close to 2400 anyway...?

Anything in between those settings you can get to by overclocking the bus speed, although you are somewhat limited with that as Sandy and Ivy (a bit less so with Ivy Bridge though) have pretty locked down FSB adjustments and are designed to only be able to overclock with K series processors and multiplier/divider changes.

Intel releases a new platform once a year, in 6 months there will be something new out so now is a fine time to buy. Socket 1155 is probably end of life with the next release, Intel only keeps a socket for 1 or 2 generations at most, and with the release of Ivy it was 2 generations. I heard mention of socket 1150 or something like that next. Socket 2011 will be around another year to year and a half, but wont get a processor upgrade for about a year and is much more expensive. Only go the socket 2011 route if you want to have the highest end stuff and are going with a 6-core processor, which you are not looking for at this time so you want socket 1155.


Also, DDR3 is end of life. The transition to DDR4 starts early next year, in about 6 months.
That Mushkin RAM you picked will do great. Timings "suck" but since timings no longer matter then the kit is fine to have. The speed and density is what you want and that kit has both those things for a pretty good price too. Very few people thought they would see a day anytime soon when 16GB of really fast RAM was only around the $100 mark. If the Redline sticks come back in stock you may want to grab those instead as they are binned a bit better (more OC headroom) and are right about the same price. I have never gotten a Redline kit that didnt overclock huge. My DDR1 sticks went all the way from 450 up to 570 (massive for its time). My DDR2 sticks went from 800 to 1112. And my DDR3 sticks go from 1600 to 1928. With your processor you will be able to take RAM even farther than I can, my memory controller sucks.
DDR4 will not be compatible with anything out now, it will require a new processor and motherboard to use. It is supposed to start around DDR-3000 and scale up to DDR-5000 speeds. At least, thats what Samsung showed a couple years ago.


The processors now days have the new PCI-E 3.0 which will let you use graphics cards for at least a couple years down the line without bottlenecking bandwidth to them. The processor is also very powerful and will give great performance for years, and the RAM is also plenty fast and will not give you bottleneck problems for years. So it is probably best if you upgrade the system now and go with 8GB RAM sticks. Next year around this time when the market is beginning to dry up in DDR3 and prices are about to spike you should buy another 16GB of the same speed to tide you over so you never have to worry about RAM until your next major build. By that time the price should be between $80-100 for another 16GB but will start to raise in price sometime between mid to late next year.
A GPU upgrade will keep you going at the very least until the next generation consoles hit the market. At that point you may need a new upgrade or you might be right around the good performance mark, should be ok. Gaming graphics are centered around consoles now days, which is why we havent advanced in 5 years and why every new card from high to low can play games now days (even integrated graphics can play most). When the new consoles hit we will see a large surge in graphics requirements for games within the first year, then it will plateau again at that requirement level for 4-6 years with very little deviation. An Ivy Bridge processor right now should hold you through the entire next generation of consoles from a performance perspective, especially if you get a nice water setup and overclock the CPU to close to 5GHz.

 

Looks like a really great build. Bet the motherboard is going to look tiny inside the full tower Did you get the Maximum V Gene board or something else?

If you need any help at all with configuring your RAM be sure and check out Mushkin's support forums. They can give you all sorts of advice on which things to tweak to get the most out of your new sticks.

 

Record run of what? I havent seen any Z77 boards in the world record area, and Gigabyte is known to not overclock as well as other brands because GB chose to modify Intel's spec and did not include the recommended capacitors for the CPU on the motherboard
http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php