My latest PC build

[MadMag]

Here is what I ordered:

- Cooler Master Cosmos II Ultra Tower
- XFX ProSeries Black Edition 1250W PSU
- Intel® Core i7-3770K Processor
- Intel® High Performance Liquid Cooling
- ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z, Socket-1155
- Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1866MHz 32GB CL10
- Plextor Blu-Ray Writer PX-B950SA
- 2 x Seagate Barracuda® 3TB
- 2 x Samsung 27" LED SyncMaster S27B350H
- MSI GeForce GTX 680 2GB PhysX CUDA
- OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 SSD 240GB

Things I had before that I use on it:

G9x Mouse
G19 Keyboard
G27 Racing Wheel
Altec Lansing speakers with sub
Sennheiser PC350 headphones
Logitech Force 3D pro Joystick
2 x Samsung 27" LED SyncMaster S27B350H
+ a lot of external HD`s

... I already have started on a new one.

[Grauniad]

It's probably the most awesome PC (outdated or not) I've come across.

Here is the current build prices from Newegg.

[MadMag]

When I built it my goal was to have the best amateur PC of my friends and I, but now I want more than that :)

[Grauniad]

Unless you go for dual CPUs and dual graphics cards, I don't see what else you can do in the short term. THis is atill an awesome beast of a machine.

[MadMag]

A rack of Revo`s :)

[Grauniad]

A rack of Revo`s :)

Can SSD do RAID well lately? Used to be they had problems with RAID and Trim.

[Grauniad]

On a more serious note - nobody I speak to (or in the articles I read) likes what Intel did to the thermal insulation material (TIM) in Ivy Bridge and  Haswell. So the latest really good overclocking CPUs were the 3770Ks you have. They were so good that the 3770K outperformed the 3820 that was a low-end enthusiast build and needed the more expensive LGA2011 motherboards.

Reports say that the Haswells can barely overclock to 4.2GHz. Sandy Bridge overclocks to 5Ghz "easily".

So then the question now is - what happens when Intel release -E series CPUs with Ivy Bridge in September and they won't overclock well. THen there is a performance incongruity. Where an older overclocked CPU cannot be bettered by a newer CPU since the performance advantages in many situations for a newer processor over the older series is in the 7-15% range.

There's no point in going for excessive cooling if you are not going to overclock these things. I don't think it's been proven that a dual-CPU Xeon can really be of benefit to a gamer. Maybe for your graphics work, but otherwise?