David,

The negatives that you read refer mainly to the limited number of available PCI-e lanes on the LGA 1155 platform. You see, LGA 1155 has only 20 total PCI-e lanes - but four of those are eaten up by the DMI 2.0 connection between the CPU and the PCH (let it be Z68, Z77, P67, etc.). And of the eight PCI-e lanes offered in the PCH, most of them are eaten up by onboard third-party controllers such as the LAN and extra USB 3.0 and SATA/eSATA controllers. That leaves fewer than four open PCI-e lanes on the PCH, forcing one to use some of the 16 available PCI-e lanes on the CPU itself. This, in turn, reduces the available number of PCI-e lanes for the primary GPU. And although the fastest current (and newest) GPUs barely take full performance advantage of even PCI-e 2.0 x8, this may change with future GPUs.

grandpooba2 wrote:

 

So would you suggest abandoning this combo of cpu/mobo for something else at this time? And thank you as well.

That setup should be fine as long as you don't try to cram in a high-end GPU, a discrete hardware RAID controller card and a PCI-e x4 I/O card all in the same system. But if you really need all of those components in the same PC, you really should spend an extra several hundred dollars for an LGA 2011 motherboard and a hexa-core i7-39xx CPU.

Speaking of the i7-3820 in one of the links: It is not all that much better (faster) than Sandy Bridge in terms of CPU performance because the i7-3820 is also only quad-core like the i7-2600K. In fact, an overclocked i7-2600K will beat an i7-3820 at its maximum Turbo frequency. As such, the i7-3820 is only recommended if you want a cheapo CPU for a high-end platform with the intention of later upgrading to a full-blown hexa- or octo-core i7 CPU in the future.

Against recommendations this afternoon I went out and picked up an i7-3770K ($290) which I am going to plug into my Z68 motherboard.  Should have some comments in the next couple of days.  This theoretically gives me PCIe 3.0 to go with my GTX 680

grandpooba2 wrote:

 

If going 2011 will this be worth the upgrade Xeon E5-2620 2GHz LGA 2011 Processor

Not worth the price: At more than $400, its price is too close to an i7-3930K for comfort. Plus, that E5-2620 is permanently locked at 2.0 GHz, and cannot be overclocked at all. By contrast, the i7-3930K runs stock at 3.2 GHz, and can be overclocked. This makes the only reason to buy an E5-2620 being if you want a cheapo dual-processor-capable CPU and a dual-CPU motherboard with the intention of upgrading to more robust (and far more expensive) octo-core CPUs some time in the future. Otherwise, that E5-2620 is best left to DP server use.

grandpooba2 wrote

 

Harm. If I stay with the p8z68-v pro/gen3 mobo 1155 would I be better to go 3770 or 2700 and would it be any performance boost to do this??

If you have the option of waiting a day or two, I will be plugging in an i7-3770K in my Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4.  Once I replace the i7-2600K and update the BIOS it will be PCIe 3.0 qualified.  It is necessary to have a 22nm chip to run PCIe 3.0 on that board.  So I am wondering if the the ASUS P6Z68 has PCIe 3.0 capabilities that require the 22nm (i7-3770) chip?  Also if you go with Harm's suggestion of the P9X79 board and were to put in an i7-2700 (32nm) chip it would sound to me like the reverse may be true, that unless you have an LGA 1155 22nm chip PCIe 3.0 will never be possible.  Also are you near a Microcenter store?  If you or a friend or a relative can walk in the store you can get the i7-3770K for $290 plus any local tax.  There probably will be very little performance difference but you will have a product lifetime

Guess what? The higher-ranked i7-2600K systems than that 49th-ranked one, save for Bill's own overclocked 5.0GHz Z68-based system with 32GB of RAM and the GTX 580, are all running an older version of Premiere Pro - 5.0.3, which uses a different caching system. (Likewise, all of the CS5.5 systems above Bill's that ranked higher are overclocked i7-39xx or hexa-core i7-9xx systems or overclocked dual-Xeon X56xx based systems.) So, for the comparison to be valid, filter out the results on the PPBM5 results table so that only those systems running version 5.5 are included.

And yes, I did test my own i7-2600K system (when it had a GTX 470 installed inside of it) with both 5.0.3 and 5.5, and my ranking plummeted from 35th with 5.0.3 all the way down to 171st with 5.5. This is, again, due to differences in the caching alogarithms between the two versions of Premiere Pro. In fact, 5.5 really made clear how weak my particular GTX 470 GPU really was - to the point that replacing it with a GTX 560 Ti 448 improved my ranking significantly.

That link doesn't work: It leads to a shopping cart whose contents can only be seen by the user who actually created the cart. Otherwise, all other users will see only an empty shopping cart.

The GA-X79-UD5 works just fine for me with the 3930K, but I avoid Crucial RAM, and have 32 GB of Corsair XMS3.

You will have to upgrade the BIOS to at least F9, and preferably F10 before you start, or the system will be subject to random freezing

David,

Any parity RAID, such as RAID 5, requires the use of a discrete hardware RAID card for the best balance between redundancy and performance. And the X79 chipset does not natively support firmware-assisted RAID in its SATA controller - but the RAID support is now entirely in software using a driver that's like the one used with Intel's workstation chipsets. The problem with software-only RAID is that it misuses the CPU, and it's sluggish in performance.