Decisions on my new build.

[toonshorty]

Here's a quick brief on the situation.

A few weeks ago I won a Gigabyte GA-X58A-OC, arguable the best 1366 board ever made.

I have no cash in hand and can only make £120 from selling my current CPU, Motherboard and RAM.

I need to find approx. £200 to buy an i7 950 + 8GB DDR3.

I'm not a huge fan of selling competition prizes for profit although this once I'm thinking it may just be worthwhile. I'm never going to use half the features on that motherboard sadly, would rather it went to someone who would get good use out of it.

I could sell the board for ~£190 hopefully (Usually retails at £225+)

The £190 + £120 of my current system would give me £310 to play with.

Bundle One (£120 Budget)

Gigabyte GA-X58A-OC (+£0.00)

Intel Core i7 950 (+£170)

8GB DDR3 RAM (+£30)

Total: £200

£80 over budget.

Bundle Two (£310 Budget)

MSI Z68A-GD55-G3 (+£100)

Intel Core i5 2500K (+£160)

8GB DDR3 RAM (+£30)

Total: £290

£20 under budget.

Which option would be best?

Right now the Gigabyte Z68A-GD55-G3 is £99.99 (Exc. VAT) at Aria but until next week you can get 20% VAT Cashback so it's total price becomes £99.99.

 

[SieB]

1366 is triple channel so the minimum amount of ram you would need is 3gb 3x1gb but a minimum of 6gb would be better 3x2gb.

Ebay may be your friend if you want to find a cheap 950.

 

[toonshorty]

1366 is triple channel so the minimum amount of ram you would need is 3gb 3x1gb but a minimum of 6gb would be better 3x2gb.

Ebay may be your friend if you want to find a cheap 950.

I don't really want to buy a second hand CPU, especially from eBay... lord knows what some of the people there do to them.

MAXIMUM VOLTAGE!!11! ... Why has u craszhed at 2.9v n00b cpu!

I can't afford 16GB RAM at the minute to run three of the four sticks and it's impossible to find someone selling cheap, decent triple channel DDR3 at the minute.

 

[hmmblah]

Looks like the best option for you would be to sell the board and go with a 2500k build. You'll save some money and probably wouldn't notice the difference anyway. In games they would perform similar, but for folding/encoding the HT on the 950 would be beneficial.

 

[UFN]

I am not sure whether i'm allowed to post direct links to other tech websites, but Anandtech has a very cool CPU comparison tool which can show you how two products bench on the same tests. The 2500k and 950 perform quite similarly in most tests (according to their charts) and of all the "Yep, this one is the clear winner" results, it is the 2500k that pulls ahead.

So in my humble opinion, the 2500k rig is your best bet

and it also gives you some breathing room for when Ivy bridge launches next year

 

[Fez]

i would sell that board mate and go for the 2500 kit you listed

 

[tinytomlogan]

Id also say go 1155 but try and scrape the money for a 2600k even if you have to buy a used one, that will rape an 1366 quad for breakfast.