Time to Upgrade My Rig, Suggestions?

[zarx]

smbu2000 said:

zarx said:
@smbu2000 Damn that looks nice
I'm so jealous right now

Thanks!

Well today I went to the retail store (bought the 580's from the online store) to sell my old cards and saw that they had almost the same deal for the Galaxy gt 580s that I bought! I was tempted to get another one, but the backplate makes things a tight fit in the adjoining slot and I don't think my powersupply would be up to it (Silverstone Strider Gold 850W (peak 950W)).

The two cards are running great though. I tested skyrim at 2560 x 1440 (resolution of my dell u2711) with everything maxed/FXAA on and it runs super smooth at over 60fps (I forgot to turn off vsync). Witcher 2 EE at 2560 x 1440 on Ultra with Ubersampling disabled runs at over 70fps. (With ubersampling on it still runs at over 30fps)

In case you were wondering about my other specs, I have:

Case: Lian Li X900; CPU: Intel i7 2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4ghz@4.6ghz (highest I've run it is just over 5ghz); Cooler: Corsair H60; MB: Asus Maximus IV Extreme (P67); RAM: 2x4GB (G.Skill Ripjaws X 1600), 2x4GB (Corsair Vengeance 1866); Boot Drive: 120GB Intel 510 SSD.

Ooh and I just noticed that Ivy Bridge cpu's are also compatible with slot 1155 mobos (P67/Z68), nice! Although, I have no intention of upgrading my cpu at the moment.

Ivy bridge doesn't really offer much of a performance boost over Sandy Bridge, the main gains are in power consumption and intergrated graphics. There is really no point in you upgrading unless they release a 6+ core Ivy bridge on the same socket. 

Haswell will be on a new socket tho, but will probably not be a pretty big jump in performance ether as they are only going for 4 core on mainstream again, even with it's new cache design with is expected to support 32MB L3 cache or 64MB shared with the GPU, which is a huge leap from Ivy bridge which currently tops out at 8MB or the E series Sandy Bridge which tops out at 20MB. 

CPUs aren't going to see massive leaps any time soon, and it's not like there are any games that a 2600K overclocked can't handle. With AMD basically saying they are not going to even try and compete at the top anymore, and refocusing on mobile and tablets.