Thread: PC Upgrade advice

Looking to overclock or not?

In that case your budget is more than sufficient.

Since overclocking isn't required though I'm going much cheaper on the board which eliminates the option of any future multi-card setups. (In other words you can't run SLI or XFire)
So for the board I'd pick this Prophecy.co.za - GIGABYTE Z68AP-D3 Z68 LGA1155 Dual-Channel DDR3 CrossFireX
(It has two PCIe-x16 slots but the second is too weak to provide enough bandwidth to a multi-card setup, due to bandwidth limitations it can basically just be treated as another PCIe-1x slot).
I picked Z68 since you might be interested in it's ability to do SSD Caching and use the processor's onboard chip to speed up video encoding whilst the actual graphics card is tackling harder tasks.
You could go even lower and get this instead.
Prophecy.co.za - Intel DH67CL-B3 Cold Lake LGA1155 DDR3 PCI-E x16 ATX

For the PSU I'd go for something nice and strong to make sure that no future flagship graphics cards give you any issues.
So I'd get this Prophecy.co.za - Corsair TX750M 750w Modular Power Supply

Case: Prophecy.co.za - Coolermaster CM Storm Scout Black Chassis with Window - No PSU

Since you're not overclocking pretty much any old DDR3-1333 RAM will do so I'd just get two sticks of this:
Prophecy.co.za - Corsair CMV4GX3M1A1333C9 VALUESELECT 4GB DDR3-1333 1.5v CL9 Desktop

And lastly for the processor we merely pick the strongest non-overclocking version and get this:
Prophecy.co.za - Intel Core i7-2600 Quad-Core LGA1155 3.4GHz Boxed Processor (Sandybridge)

Total comes to: R7377.86

Thanks for that.
If I want to possibly look at a multi-card setup what MB would you the recommend? Ignore the budget for this one

Well the cheapest that was up to the task used to be the ASUS P8P67 Pro but it doesn't seem to be on the site anymore. Before the Z68 chipset came out that would have been my pick.
Since however Z68 has those additional features it would make more sense to pick a Z68 board so I'd probably say the ideal board then would be this:
Prophecy.co.za - Asus P8Z68-V LGA1155 Dual-Channel DDR3 (New B3 Sandybridge) SLI/CrossFire

You need PCIe-x16 lanes running at least at 8X (all the cheaper boards run at 4X AND/or share their power delivery with the PCIe-1x slots meaning they're disabled if the 2nd PCIe-x16(at 4x) is in use so it's very far from ideal) for a multi-card setup to be able get enough bandwidth that the board doesn't bottleneck it.

Since you said ignore budget one might as well go the whole hog then and switch to a 2600K, switch up the ram to 2x4GB 1600 Corsair Vengeance Sticks and throw in a CPU cooler like the CoolerMaster V6GT to add overclocking as an option so that absolutely all bases are fully covered.

I'd rather just stick with the way things are. You'd need a little over 2 extra grand to make this work.
First of all there's a problem with the RAM, it's just 1 4GB stick and it's volted incorrectly, you need 1.5v RAM. Then I forgot to mention that depending on the power of the multi-card setup you might also need an even stronger PSU, more like 850W. And you didn't swop up the processor to the 2600K. And the cooler is still missing. So that build is both missing stuff and wrong.

Honestly if budget is a concern now it's likely to be one all the way through and a multi-card setup is more for people who care about performance over money spent. So I'd just forget it. A couple of months down the line there will be a nicer stronger single card all the time anyways and I'd much rather have that than 2 cards.