Need your opinion lads.

B0X

Righty, so i'm putting together an upgrade for my PC at the moment have a budget of about €850 but i'm looking to maximize my money's effectiveness

I don't need a power supply, case or main harddrive as I have all those already, what i'm looking for is:

CPU: I do a good bit of video encoding so I need something that'll just breeze through that.

Maybe this i5
Or this i7

Do I need to buy a fan or does that come in the box?

RAM: Looking for about 16GB, not sure what type to get.
I was looking at these

Motherboard: Needs USB 3 and enough space to fit all that ram.
I was looking at this one

GPU: Something very good, I'm looking to play BF3/Skyrim all in eye melting high quality when they come out. I'm not sure what brand to go for, I've been using ATI for the last few years and i've always been impressed but would be open to nvidia too. Really whatever gives me good bang for my buck.
What do people think of the 6970?

SSD: I'd love to get one for under €100 with good read write speeds (They seem to vary a lot) The capacity isnt a big deal, it's just for stuff like windows and photoshop, everything else can run off the normal drive.
This one?

BR Drive: Something with decent read speeds. Doesnt need to be able to write.
This has got x10 read speeds for BR

Cheers!

deconduo

It would help to know what case and PSU you have. However something like this should do you fine:

Total build cost: €752.87 + €30 shipping
Intel Core i5-2500K Box, LGA1155 €175.58
ASRock Z68 Extreme4 (B3), Sockel 1155, ATX €151.97
Club 3D Radeon 6950 1024MB, AMD Radeon HD 6950, PCI-Express €188.59
2 x 8GB-Kit G.Skill RipJaws-X PC3-10667U CL9 €42.83
Samsung SH-B123L Retail €57.63
Crucial M4 64GB SSD 6,4cm (2,5") €93.44

If you have a decent enough case+PSU that will allow you to crossfire 6950s if you get a second one. The stock cooler on the i5 will allow for some mild overclocking, but most people can get up to at least 4.5GHz with this cooler:

http://www3.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=49134&agid=669

B0X

I have a Gigabyte Aurora case and a 600W OCZ power supply.

Couple questions:

The motherboard you linked, what makes it €70 more than the other?

Is it better to have 2x8GB sticks or 4x4GB sticks?

That crucial SSD's read speeds are 100MBs slower than the OCZ so for that extra 2 euro i think i'd stick with it.

The blu ray drive looks good!

I'm thinking it probably wouldn't be worth going crossfire with 2 6950's I think the single 6970 would do, i'll have to look at the nvidia offerings too.

deconduo

B0X wrote: »

I have a Gigabyte Aurora case and a 600W OCZ power supply.

Couple questions:

The motherboard you linked, what makes it €70 more than the other?

Is it better to have 2x8GB sticks or 4x4GB sticks?

That crucial SSD's read speeds are 100MBs slower than the OCZ so for that extra 2 euro i think i'd stick with it.

The blu ray drive looks good!

I'm thinking it probably wouldn't be worth going crossfire with 2 6950's I think the single 6970 would do, i'll have to look at the nvidia offerings too.

Its €70 more becuase it supports overclocking, crossfire and quicksync. The motherboard you linked wouldn't allow you to overclock the i5-2500k

2x8GB sticks is slightly better, but not enough to compensate for the price premium you pay for it.

The M4 is actually a better SSD, you can't just look at one single bench result, you need to look at the whole picture. Also OCZ have a really high failrate on their SSDs.

Your PSU isn't enough to handle crossfired 6950s anyway. If you are using a single 1080p monitor the 6950 will do you fine. I don't think that the 6970 (or GTX 570) is worth the price premium you pay over the 6950 at the moment.

If you want to crossfire in the future, stick with that motherboard and grab this PSU as well:
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=39875&agid=1629

Otherwise you can drop down to this one:
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=46922&agid=1601