Current fave reasonable and ideal boards for a 3930k?

joconnell

Heya Folks,

I'm planning an upgrade soon and I'll be getting a 3930k for a tonne of 3d rendering. I'll likely look at overclocking it as it seems to good not to and it'll be going into a pretty big silverstone case. What I'm wondering is what's everyone's current thoughts on the motherboard and cooler? I've used a tonne of asus and gigabyte stuff over the years but reputations change - what would be your preferred motherboard and cooler option for a mid price and premium price board? I'll likely want something with 8 ram slots to start with 32 gigs 4x8 to leave options for afterwards and legacy ide connections for some drives. On top I'll likely look at a 660ti card for graphics and aim for silence over gaming performance.

Also is price the main reason for everyone going with hardwareversand - is their base price cheaper than scan or is it an exchange rate and shipping thing?

Much appreciated!

John

Monotype

Hardwareversand is usually cheaper on average - their budget PSUs are cheaper and better than elsewhere and often their boards and CPUs are cheaper. They're not always cheaper for everything - Monitors usually aren't the best value and graphics cards/hard drives/SSDs can vary. It's a fast changing market so any place might be better value from week to week.

I think that socket 2011 is terrible value. I'd go with a 1155 board unless you really need the extra cores and 8 RAM slots. The 3770K has hyperthreading and would probably do an excellent job. The power consumption goes really mad on 3930K range if you bump up the clocks. Some of the high end motherboards for 1155 from Asrock have IDE connections, but I'm not seeing that in their 2011 range. You would be as well off getting adapters, although if you can afford it, maybe new drives instead.

joconnell

Yep to be honest the 8 slots and the higher speed of the 3930k would be useful for me - I'll be starting with 32 gigs of ram since I do a lot of fluid simulation stuff (and krakatoa )and might eventually get up to needing more! I've got an old pci ide card which might be a better option though as you say an SSD would be very interesting to try in conjunction with condensing all my files onto less drive letters.

It'll be lasting me for maybe 3 years so I reckon I'll go above the 3770 - much appreciated for the pointers about power consumption though.

glynf

Hi John,

Having looked at the X79 route for multi GPU support I want to go with 3 x 7970's-and having done a bit of research I was going to go with an Asus Rampage IV Formula & a 3820. As the formula is 32 GB RAM max, you would be looking at a Asus Rampage IV Extreme for 64GB's max.

An other board well worth a look is the Asrock X79 Extreme9, reviews well and comes in at just over €300, much cheaper than the IV extreme.

I gave up on the x79 idea as I decided I'm staying with Z77 as the Asus Maximus V Extreme can do x8/x16/x8 for a 3 card setup, and I'm not sure what else is available since I looked at this. would avoid Gigabyte as they seem to have had a lot of recalls for their x79 boards.

Hardwareversand are the most popular here as they are indeed the most reasonably priced, and the shipping is a flat rate of €15/20 per order. Anywhere UK based is much more with the exchange rate. E.g. I ordered three monitors from amazon.de as they worked out €80 cheaper each than from amazon.co.uk..


BTW what Silverstone case are you looking at, and where are you buying?

joconnell

I reckon it'll be hardware versand in the end. I'm going to stick with the 3930k as cpu speed is my number one priority right now, I'm not as interested in sli or games stuff and I'll be only using the one geforce - likely a 660ti now. I'm gutting an old machine (i5 760 and a gtx 465) which uses a Silverstone temjim TJ05 case - http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-242-1.htm so it's got plenty of room. I've a few old legacy drives so I might look at transitioning off of them - years of duplicate raw files and mp3's to sift through now - bleugh

glynf

Heh. same as that, I have shed loads of duplicate pics and mp3's scattered across removable drives etc. Keep saying one of these days I'll sort it...undecided on the exact day though:)