[QUOTE="etmaul"]

Thanks for the quick responses guys!

Good to know I can hang on to the processor for a bit longer. I'll look into a 7850 as well. Do you think 4GB is good or go 8GB for the RAM.

As for overclocking, is that something I should do in the BIOS or is there a specific program, I've never done it before.

ionusX

Leave it to ionus to add some completely irrelevant and unnecessary info pimping AMD. The guy doesn't have an AMD CPU and with $300 for upgrade all of which is going to GPU and RAM he has no chance of having one anytime soon. I know ur trying to be helpful in your own way but man common... tone down the blatant favoritism to something that is objectively inferior, pretty sure everyone here has heard enough as you post in like every thread. Sorry if I come off as an ass its just your so relentless its tiring...

tough one but i5 cuz ur 460s are SLIed and prb giving pretty good performance

Are you kidding me you call this wildly varying results? Those look perfectly normal stop being paranoid. Also any GTX 600 card will vary cuz its auto overclock constantly varies based on heat and power...

[QUOTE="ionusX"]

doesnt change anything.. manually oc'd 6850 is superior to factory overclocked 7770ghz ed., if you wish ti discuss stock.. then its a tie

Lox_Cropek

Ya they both OC exactly the same so why woukdwould you do one and not the other?

Windows 8 is better than Windows 7. Theres no reason to simply skip it.

Steam works fine with Widows 8; currently using both at the moment.

XaosII

Ya so long as you can get used to the metro page instead of a start menu everything works fine. No reason to skip as it runs lighter resulting in generally better gaming performance and quicker boot times.

I wouldn't bother, you should get the alienware brand keyboard as they are obviously best.

looks good

Ya ive never done it and normally wouldn't ever consider but I figured it was too good a chance to pass up as when the new ones come out I prb wouldn't get as much for mine on ebay. The noise and heat on the refrence card has just been so annoying and I didnt wanna be stuck with it for the next 1.5-2 years at least, or even longer if I get another and crossfire which these will crossfire MUCH better than the refrence cards.

so just saw thishttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102982and decided its so cheap I cant resist. between $20 rebate, $50 sleeping dogs game and selling my old refrence sapphire 7970 on ebay, its only gonna cost me like $10. So excited to get this thing its supposed to be one of the quietest cards around where as mine now sounds pretty much like a jet engine all the time. I have an antec 1100 with 10 fans so dont really care if it dosent exhaust the heat out of the case. This card should OC more at like 20C cooler and all be quieter than my PSU and case fans. :D

[QUOTE="Obiwan_1O"]

I want to preface by saying that I can play any game smoothly with max settings so >30 fps at this point im still happy with the CPU and planning on waiting for haswell to upgrade. Having said that for instance every test/benchmark that specifies CPU is always my lowest score such as in my windows experience index where every single option is 7.9 with the CPU at 7.6. Now some games that could have higher frames and arent like at 60fps are total war shogun 2, empire total war, battlefield 3, GW2, the witcher 2, borderlands 2 (with max physx), batman AC, Metro 2033, and crysis 2. For gaming core clock speed and more efficent clock speed (which his used and what I was hoping for cheap 2500k has the advantage with) are king. Games simply cannot utilize all 8 cores on my CPU and shogun is a perfect example of that, the game should be a joke but its not >60fps b/c it dosent utilize the cores for squat. I rape at handbrake and BOINC though ;D

hartsickdiscipl

A true 8-core with the Nehalem i7 architecture would perform quite a bit better in some of those games than your 930. I don't know that such a CPU ever existed. What you have is a quad-core with hyperthreading. Hyperthreading is utilized by next to no games. Of course clock for clock efficiency has improved with Sandy and Ivy Bridge, but Nehalem is still a very strong architecture. Consider the fact that many of us here still use 3 to 4ghz Phenom II X4's as our CPUs and get very good performance in games. Your CPU is quite a bit faster clock for clock. How you spend your money is your business, but I think you're misusing the term "bottleneck" by tagging your CPU as such. It's definitely not.

Misusing bottleneck I am not, a bottleneck exsists in any system and it is simply whatever is the slowest component preventing the the others from fully utilizing all of their potential. You are a small minded arrogant prick who cant see beyond himself and cannot simply understand something without comparing it to himself. I do not care at all what you are using or how it compares, I never said my CPU was SLOW I said relativley to the rest of MY syetem it is the SLOWEST and that is a massive difference. It is my money and I will do whatever the hell I want with it as I worked hard for it. Also I know far more about computers than you and I dont need an education about cores as I know i7s dont have 8 physical cores, and thats not what im talking about. What I am talking about is the difference between his i5 and my i7 which is 4 virtual cores equaling a total 8 logical cores which the games dont care about at all giving me no performance increase, therefore the only difference between his i5 and my i7 is clock speed and efficency at that clock speed. With my 212 evo I could get his 2500k to 4.5 GHz vs my current 3.8 which would yeild a much greater performance and if I could of got it cheap and then sold mine It would have been worth it. that is all...