| Shinobi-san said: The MSI Mpower Z77 mobi: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130660 |
Since he is trying to maximize his gaming performance, the motherboard and RAM should be the first places to cut costs. If it matters, you can get DDR3-2800 support, SLI and CF support and a ton of features in the $120 Asrock Z77 Extreme 4. The mobo you linked is $190.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157293
Actually even Extreme 3 has most of those features in tact and it was $110 not long ago on Newegg. Instead of spending $$ on a board that supports WiFi, which tend to be high-end ones, it's more cost effective to just add a wireless USB for $10-13:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833166055
Regarding RAM overclocking, mobo support for speeds above DDR3-1600 is not really critical since you can use lower multiplier when overclocking. But as I said you can get that on $110-120 boards. Also there are not many budget RAM sticks that that can hit high clocks. There are 2 I can think of like Samsung ECO Green or Crucial Ballistix 1.35V low profile.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147096
or 2 of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148654
Getting RAM that can do DDR3-2133mhz or faster starts eating into the GPU budget which seems to be a big issue in this case. Furthermore, you'd need to spend a TON to get DDR3-2400 kit in comparison. Regardless, for games, DDR3-2400mhz will provide 1-2 fps performance increase over DDR3-1600mhz and probably barely 1% when you are GPU limited, which is going to be the case most of the time at 1920x1080 with MSAA on an HD7870. It's not going to make his gaming experience any more playable. It's something you worry about if you are running server based applications, WinRAR or something of the sort.
You can see for games, faster RAM is not going to matter, especially as you start cranking game settings and resolution.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/memory/2011/01/11/the-best-memory-for-sandy-bridge/10
Dgc would be way better off using that budget to step up from 7870 to GTX660Ti for instance, rather than spending it on an expensive motherboard and RAM. I agree with you that the original motherboard is not good and in this case it's actually worth it to spend $10-20 above his original board pick. You can still get a great overclocking board with more features for under $130. Getting a $180+ boards as you suggested will not do anything for games and is wild overkill for this build when he can't even squeeze an SSD or a faster GPU.
A lot of people buy into this myth that you need a $200+ board to get awesome overclocking. Here is the Extreme 4 $120 board against $200-400 boards (UP7 is a $399 board highlighted in red and it overclocked worse than "budget" ASrock Extreme 4 or Gigabyte UD3H boards):
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/gigabyte-ga-z77x-up7_7.html#sect0
For a gaming rig around 1-2 GPUs, imo the best way to save $ is starting with the motherboard (unless you need specific features like 8 SATA ports, dual 1 gigabit ethernet, higher end onboard sound, wi-fi/ bluetooth as you mentioned) and RAM. Spend more on the PSU, GPU and CPU cooler since that's what's going to allow you to reach 4.5-4.6ghz on IVB as it gets hot. Also, CPU cooler and PSU can be reused for future builds.
