Motherboard upgrade

[Deleted]

Hi, I have been meaning to upgrade my PC for some time now, I have most of the components I need but I have been waiting for haswell to launch to finish it. I will be transferring a Readon HD 6850 and samsung 240gb SSD from my current PC into the new one. My current PC was a budget pre-built one and after time and some additions took their tole it is not in great shape, though it still runs okay for now: internal case Cramped, only one hard drive bay (with 3 in there), no cable management and the size of the video card has caused some issues.

I use it mostly for gaming and I am starting to run into games that it has trouble handling, Planetside 2 for example starts to perform vary poorly when there is a high population around. This was taken while I was ingame in a low pop area

The other parts I have are:
2 moniters - main one is 1440x900,
zulman z11 plus case,
8gb ddr3 RAM,
1TB Western digital carviar blue HDD,
corsair cx600 PSU,
Windows 7 home premium.

So I need a CPU, motherboard and heatsink. I live in Ireland and would like to keep the budget under 400 (450 if necessary) euro if I can. I was thinking an i5-4670k for the cpu but I'm having trouble picking the board. I saw this which seems like a decent deal, but I'm not sure if the board is any good (however delivery to Ireland costs about 30 euro on top of that, I mostly use amazon which delivers for free but doesn't have haswell in stock yet).

I want to overclock but not to the point of pushing the limits of the chip for fear of causing damage, maybe 4.0 to 4.2 ghz, would one of the more budget boards like the one above (or any other suggestions) be okay or do I need to aim for something higher end?

Not sure if it makes a difference but in a few months time I also plan to replace my monitors with 3 22-24'' monitors at 1960x1080 for use with eyefinity and then upgrade my video card after that.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

[n0cturnal]

Not sure if it makes a difference but in a few months time I also plan to replace my monitors with 3 22-24'' monitors at 1960x1080 for use with eyefinity and then upgrade my video card after that.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

I would suggest you get a better GPU first and then the monitors.

Also WTF 82 processes?

[chazus]

Also WTF 82 processes?

And 100% ram used.

I don't think you can get a motherboard and eyefinity capable card to fit into that case. And you need more ram. Sooo you really should expand your budget. Basically you're looking at a full system build, with the exception of the hard drive.


EDIT: I just noticed you have 8gb ram... But only 4gb available. Are you using Win Home Premium... 32 bit?

[slasher0161]

Another point of note here is thus far haswell is looking like its an absolute thermal beast of a chip (sadly not in a good way) if you budget is tight sticking to ivy and upgrading that gpu is probably your better route, if you go haswell and hunt for 4.2+ your going to need a decent cooler or you will be cooking breakfast on your case (slight hyperbole but until more reviews are about I would hold fire).

Also one other thing of note I remember skimming over it somewhere about usb2 and hibernate having some weird issue on z87 (not that it will effect 95% of desktop users, just a thing to note and look into).

[Deleted]

And 100% ram used.

I don't think you can get a motherboard and eyefinity capable card to fit into that case. And you need more ram. Sooo you really should expand your budget. Basically you're looking at a full system build, with the exception of the hard drive.


EDIT: I just noticed you have 8gb ram... But only 4gb available. Are you using Win Home Premium... 32 bit?

Sorry guess my origional post was a little confusing.

all of this is stuff I have, but have not installed yet:
zulman z11 plus case, (supports ATX boards)
8gb ddr3 RAM,
1TB Western digital carviar blue HDD,
corsair cx600 PSU,

I am running 4gb ddr2 atm with an AMD phenom X4 9650 2.3 Ghz. And windows 7 64bit.
The photos are of the PC I am using now which I plan to return to it's original configuration and re-purpose once I have the last of the parts I need.

as for the 82 processes I didn't know that was out of the ordinary, I will run a virus/malware scan but if you are curious here is a screen shot of the processes tab.

I know I will have to lower the settings on any games I try eyefinity with for a while if I get the monitors first but I ham happy enough with my GPU for now.
I did some testing with eyefinity with the 2 monitors I have, it worked well but obvious problem of the bezel running through the crosshair was a bit of a deal breaker.

apart from that it still runs games in single monitor mode well, tried Crysis 2 yesterday, all settings on ultra without the hi-rez texture pack. it had the odd frame rate drop but ran smooth enough for the most part.

[n0cturnal]

as for the 82 processes I didn't know that was out of the ordinary, I will run a virus/malware scan but if you are curious here is a screen shot of the processes tab.

Yeah I don't run Chrome which accounts for a lot of those processes. The rest are nothing out of the ordinary really.