Hello and down to business...

MrFSU · Post by **MrFSU** » Wed Feb 04, 2015 9:23 am

Big difference with Nvidia card power usage. I was very surprised to see that.

Case, OS and power supply ordered this morning... Sale on white version of the case I wanted on newegg. Also rebate on power supply. Waiting a few days to see if any more sales pop up on other stuff.

Finally, I see there's a least half a dozen choices for the GTX 980. Any suggestions, or a site that compares them card to card? Price differences are pretty close but one or 2 are quite a bit more expensive.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Wed Feb 04, 2015 12:12 pm

I bought the Asus Strix which is factory overclocked. The fans never even spin under moderate loads like L4D2. Nice build quality. Better yet, it's 60 bucks less than I paid for it back in December. On sale for $555 less $10 rebate.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

MrFSU · Post by **MrFSU** » Wed Feb 04, 2015 3:06 pm

Ok is there really a big difference between that Strix and this Matrix? $100 price difference!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 38566&SID=

MrFSU · Post by **MrFSU** » Wed Feb 04, 2015 3:12 pm

And while I'm asking questions, does anyone have any experience with the small m.2 SSD drives? The motherboard I'm thinking of getting has a slot for one and I'm thinking of dropping this in it... 1000MBps reads!!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820147365

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Wed Feb 04, 2015 6:37 pm

Only thing I see is the Matrix has slightly faster clock speeds, and the ROG branding. The clock speeds aren't that much higher than the Strix, and the Strix could easily Overclock to the same speeds. The Matrix is targetted at really high end enthusiasts - the kind of people that will try to do massive overclocking for bragging rights, so it has even more of a stable voltage control system.

Informative video here explains the differences.:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UbDFVFgwVwI

The Strix is already a high end enthusiast card with a non reference design. The matrix just pushes it a bit more. I saw nothing in that video that makes me regret buying the Strix.

The Strix has a solid 68% 5 eggs out of 47 reviews. I don't really see any good reason to spend the extra 100 bucks on the Matrix.

Nuby1Canuby · Post by **Nuby1Canuby** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 6:57 am

MrFSU wrote:Ok is there really a big difference between that Strix and this Matrix? $100 price difference!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 38566&SID=

I agree with what FlyingPenguin said.
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

Here's the HardOCP reviews of the 2 cards:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/01/ ... rd_review/

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/12/ ... rd_review/

The R9 290X is also a good alternative. It's only about 10% slower then the GTX 980 at triple screen resolutions and it's about $300 less expensive. My ASUS Direct CU II OC R9 290X was $260.
The 290X does use about 100 watts more power though.
My system uses about 300 watts playing Call of Duty Advanced Warfare but 400 watts playing Battlefield Hardline Beta.

MrFSU · Post by **MrFSU** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 12:06 pm

It's been years and years since I'd been on that hardocp website. Lots of good reviews and info there. I'm gonna have to agree with it not being worth the extra $100 for that card...

They also might have talked me into a step down in processor... Still reading about that!

Err · Post by **Err** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 12:49 pm

MrFSU wrote:It's been years and years since I'd been on that hardocp website. Lots of good reviews and info there. I'm gonna have to agree with it not being worth the extra $100 for that card...

They also might have talked me into a step down in processor... Still reading about that!

I'd be on the fence about the processor as well. If you don't do any video encoding our use multithreaded applications, the extra chores aren't going to do much for you. However Directx 12 is just around the corner and is supposed to allow access to the other cores.

wvjohn · Post by **wvjohn** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 2:15 pm

When I was looking at the 4 core Haswells, the difference between the I5 @ 3.5 and the I7 @ 4.0 was about $70. Since I generally keep my main rig for 4 years or so, I figured it was worth it for the higher base clock and the extra cores, esp. with DX12 in the next year or so. I read a long writeup about that somewhere that talked about being using multiple cores to talk to the GPU.

Latest list from TomsHW - the six cores have 4 channels of memory which could make a difference http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gam ... ,3106.html

Nuby1Canuby · Post by **Nuby1Canuby** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 4:39 pm

The I7 5820K 6 core processor might be a good compromise. I think they all overclock about the same and you've got a CPU cooler.

MrFSU · Post by **MrFSU** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 7:14 pm

OK after much reading and research, all parts are ORDERED!! Everything should be here by the middle of next week and I plan to start building it the weekend right after that!

Final stuff ordered: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/mrfsu/saved/wQqV3C

Thanks everyone for all your help. I will update with how it goes!

EDIT: I expect a call from the Amex fraud dept any minute now! LOL

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 8:14 pm

That's going to be a nice build.

Err · Post by **Err** » Thu Feb 05, 2015 9:05 pm

Awesome! Post pics of your build.

wvjohn · Post by **wvjohn** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 10:27 am

Looks great except for having to use windows

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 2:04 pm

Alex, if you haven't played with Win8 yet, I have a thread here on using Classic Shell and fixing associations so you never see the Metro apps. Makes Win8/8.1 look and feel exactly like Win7:

http://pcabusers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=55704

I actually find the Win8 core to be much better than Win7 (memory efficiency, SSD optimization, faster kernels, less unnecessary services). So much so that I put Win8 on my gaming PC build last year and never regretted it (sticking to Win7 on my main workstation because it would be too painful to do a fresh OS install on it, and I never like to do upgrades).

There's really nothing wrong with Win8 except Microsoft's idiotic decision to force the Metro GUI down notebook and desktop user's throats. This is one reason why I'm really looking forward to Win10. I think Win10 is going to be a LOT closer to what the Win8 original vision was supposed to be before somebody decided they needed to try to make it tablet centric. Win10 will be built on the Win8 core, with a lot more intelligent design considerations for the GUI and some nice additional features.