Computer building guru for SH5 questions????

[TheDarkWraith]

Originally Posted by drakkhen20

@tdw,
you and me sound like on the same level as building computers. now heres some questions... i had two 570s SLIed in my last build. so this build im actually thinking about doing a single gpu setup this go round. so your saying that the 500 such as a 560 will do just fine? and how do you feel about the asus z77 notherboards because it looks like i can get some good deals on those. how do you feel about the i5s and 3 cuz i had a i7 so i dont know how i feel about back stepping to those. thanks for your replies.

Two 570s SLI'd will kill any single 500 series card except the 590. Compare the 600 series cards to your SLI'd 500 series...it's quite interesting the results. I'm holding out on buying the 690 because my current motherboard only supports PCI-X 2.0 spec and in order to use the full potential of the 690 you need PCI-X 3.0 spec. The 590 is a great card - I've had mine for over a year and am very happy with it. If you're going to go single GPU from an SLI setup of 500 series or less I would definitely go with the GTX680. If the GTX680 is too pricey next in line for me would be my current card, GTX590.

The Asus z77 motherboards are killer if you're building an Intel setup. The z77s will fully utilize SSDs to their full potential. My current motherboard is only letting my RAID 0'd OCZs max out at 584MB/s whereas the same RAID0 setup on a z77 is cranking out over 1000MB/s

The I7 is an amazing processor. I have a 2.8GHz I7 in my Qosmio laptop. It smokes my AMD X6 1100T BE. The 1100T is OC'd at 4.1GHz currently and the I7 in my laptop still outperforms it at 2.8GHz. You can never go backwards in computer hardware! You must always go forwards. If you have an I7 why would you want to step backwards into an I5 or an I3? Why is the I7 so much better? Mostly because it has a higher IPC (instructions per clock). This means it's able to crunch more numbers (do more work) per clock than the AMDs (hence why the I7 in my laptop outperforms my 1100T in my gaming system even though the 1100T is clocked 1.3GHz higher).

There are more factors as to why the I7 is superior to AMDs line of processors but they mainly deal with the processor's architecture (pipeline depth, number of ALUs, branch prediction, cache size, types of cache used, etc.). I may sound like an Intel fanboy but I'm not - I love AMD because of the value I get for the money spent. AMD realized that they couldn't do the same amount of work per clock as Intel (IPC) so they did what they had to do - increase the GHz of their processors to stay 'competitive'.

Have you ever read any documents on processor architecture? It's quite fascinating reading, well at least to me it is. How many of you know that the processor has it's own microcode contained in it (akin to BIOS)? I've always wanted to read out this microcode from the CPU but I've never found anything that references how to access this 'memory'