Cpu? Mobo and ram? Sounds like a read issue to me. Either in your ram or your hard drive. At 1680x1050 the 580 should be able to handle anything you throw at it. The temps show that because if it was being strained it would be well over 80 degrees.

Depending on the resolution he's playing at he may or may not need a 2nd 580. I'd get a 2nd one just to be safe to be over the 60fps mark in most games. As for a cpu, the intel sandy bridge stuff should be readily available again shortly. The recall wasn't with the processors, it was with the sata controller on the chipsets being faulty. A core i5 2500K with a slight overclock would probably suit him perfectly for 2 GTX 580's in SLI, although a good sandy bridge board is gonna be in the ballpark of a good x58 board and you get more pci lanes with x58 as well as triple channel ram.

In all seriousness, that's why there's a difference between pc enthusiasts and economists. Enthusiasts don't care to spend the extra change to get the features an Intel board has to offer. I've been on both sides of the fence, having just migrated from an AMD system to an intel/nvidia system. I can definitely say the extra money you pay for the intel system is not wasted. Everything works just like it's supposed to. I migrated from an AMD 965 with 2 HD5870's to an i7 980X with 3 GTX 570's. Aside from Intel boards sporting the NF 200 chip and supporting native SLI, Nvidia's drivers are far superior to AMD's when using more than 1 card. AMD's gpu line has horrible issues with microstuttering and Crossfire issues. Any GPU guru would know this.

As for the OP, if you want to know about the 560, just head over to Guru3D or youtube and search for GTX 560 reviews. It's about that simple. ;)

If you're going to get a PSU, I'd personally only reccommend two brands: Corsair and Ultra. Corsair are easier to get a hold of, and their top of the line psu's (either AX or HX depending on your desires and your wallet) give great efficiency and Corsair gives great warranty, 7 years I believe. Can't really go wrong with either Corsair or Ultra. The difference is that Ultra is super rare, and Corsair really isn't.

10-20% fps increase, 20% less power use, 10-15C drop in temps. I'm not talking about just graphic performance, I'm talking about overall performance.

Hah I wouldn't pay it. I have a 5870 I'm getting ready to sell. I'm only gonna ask 150 for it. :/ Old old tech and I hear they run madly hot.

Hi, I am thinking about upgrading from a 8800gts 512 in sli to a single 460 gtx oc 1gb. Would it be worth it to get a second 460 and use sli? I had problems with my last sli setup. I think they were heat related. I know I probably wont see much of a bump in fps, but it will be nice to have the 1 gb of memory.

taylor12702003

Just wait. The GTX550's are coming out mid march and are based off the same core as the GTX560Ti. These cards will produce more fps and have better temps than the gtx460's as well as using less power, and they'll probably be around the same price as the 460's, and SLI scaling on the fermi cards is amazing. If you can afford it, you should definitely go sli, although depending on your current psu you may need to upgrade that as well.

Actually there is an AM3 board that supports SLI, just not natively. The Asus Crosshair IV Extreme motherboard sports a Lucid Hydralogix 200 chip. What this does is it allows you to mix and match gpu's (i.e. AMD 5870+GTX480) and use the power of both gpu's to generate your video output. You can also run SLI with more than one nvidia card and still use the nvidia control panel, it just has to run through the Hydra 200 so it's not actually labelled as SLI.

Bit of info about raiding ssds:

1) There is currently no way to pass the TRIM instruction to a drive that is a member of a RAID array. Intel's latest RAID drivers allow you to TRIM non-member RAID disks, but not an SSD in a RAID array.

2) Giving up TRIM support means that you need a fairly resilient SSD, one whose performance will not degrade tremendously over time. On the bright side, with the exception of the newer SandForce controllers, I'm not sure we've seen a controller as resilient as Intel's."

Azurites

OCZ has developed a tool specifically for raided ssd's of their brand called the OCZ Garbage Collector. This program acts as a trim utility that you can run manually, that way if you RAID ssd's you don't lose Trim support, you just have to run it yourself.

I'm running 2 ssd's at the moment and they're worth every penny. The only thing you'll hear coming from your pc will be your fans. No more harddrive chatter. SSD's use less energy to power them, and in turn generate less heat also. The 2.5" form factor also makes them ideal for custom placement out away from the rest of your hardware (I've seen people mount them on the backside of their motherboard tray to hide them). One 30GB SSD is enough for a system drive and a couple small applications as long as you maintain it. My current configuration is a 60GB Vertex 2 and a 120GB Agility drive, and I use externals for mass storage such as movies and music and such, as USB 2.0 provides more than enough transfer rate for streaming content. SSD's are so fast on their own that I don't really think you'll notice much of a difference in speed. If you have a board that has a properly set up quick boot function, you'll go from hitting the power switch to your desktop in about 16 seconds. The real gain in SSD's are install times and load times for applications installed on them. I can install Starcraft 2 which is 12gb in size from disc to drive in a little over 3 minutes. You'll see a big improvement, and if you have the money, they're well worth it in the long run.