At what point is some extras a waste of money?

[Chrisqt]

So I am going to be building my first rig in 2012, when the new intel CPU's and 600 series of nvidia cards get released. I haven't had a new PC in just over 3 years now, so it will be close to 3.5 years old by then. My last PC was budgeted a bit but for this new build, I plan to go as hardcore as I can. But...at what point is it a stupid purchase?. In my last PC I went all medium-end parts, but after a year or so I was not able to max games out. I want to be able to max games out for about 2 years+.

I basically want to get the top end CPU for gaming out of intels newest sets AND the top end gpu of the released 600 series. So basically a i7-3500k (just pretend its the new i5-2500k) and a GTX680. Note: Those are placeholder names. But you get my point.

Now with SLi. I've never had Sli. But I've heard it does have some issues, so thats why i've always kept away from it. But I really want to go all out, so I am actually willing to spend the extra for a 2nd GTX680. At what point do you think it becomes a stupid buy?

[DeltrusDisc]

It becomes a stupid buy if you don't actually have any use for the item.

Imo, SLI is for when you're running high res monitors, high graphically intensive games like BF3 or Witcher 2, triple+ monitor setup, and/or 3D vision.

If you're planning on any of this, which it sounds like you kind of are, then I'd say go for it. However, NVidia's 6xx series is apparently going to see a huge % increase in capabilities from the 5xx series, so who knows how much one 680 could do.

What resolution monitor are you thinking? 1920x1080 is fairly easy for a typical high-end graphics card but something like 2560x1600 or whatever it is, could use a couple - especially in those games I listed.

[kailtas]

Purely for gaming.
Geting an intel Xtreme CPU is pointless (As in 990x and 3960x). Those CPUs, while good for gaming, is useless in price/performance ratio.

For graphis card, it depends on your resolution.
1920x1080 / 1920x1200 - Anything above 2 x80s/x70s is not gona bring you allot of performance.
2560x1440 / 2560x1600 - 3 x80s/x70s would be the best. I heard that a 4th GPU add very little performance increase, and may in certain games drop the FPS by a tiny amount.

Ram
For games, 8GB is the sweet spot. Preferably with the option for 16GB, not because it will be a must within 2 years. But because the difference between 4x2GB chips and 2x4GB chips is neglible when it comes to price. And the difference between 1333/1600/1866 MHZ frequency is neglible in games, aswell is the timings. So any set of 2x4GB running at the correct voltage will do.

For Mobo, HDD, optical drive, case and PSU. Common sense applies.

[Lilfrier]

Is GTX an in-stone decision? If you're talking multi-GPU setup, doesn't Crossfire have a bit better go in terms of stability? Also, when I last got a card (Radeon 5850), AMD had a solid grip on the heat/power consumption advantage. Has nVidia negated that gap, or is it still a good enough margin that a SLIGHT decrease in FPS for a Radeon card or two would be worth it because of better running temperatures and wattage?

Again, I haven't been in the GPU market in a couple of years, so I'm wondering why Radeon cards aren't being considered here. Is it that the 7000 series isn't close?

[Asera]

Unless you plan on replacing the GPU every generation, any system built will not be able to completely max out all games for 2+ years from the time it was built.

Future proofing is stupid.