- ASRock Z77 Extreme4 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Core i5-3570 Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 77W - G.SKILL Ares Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) - G.SKILL Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) - eVGA GeForce GTX 660 Any thoughts or comments? -KM
While a 660 can play any game on the market, it will not be able to play the newest ones on high settings. A regular 660 is a significantly castrated version of the GTX 6xx series. It has a chunk of render pipelines removed, which also remove one of the tessellation engines, and a huge chunk of unified shaders removed, and its memory channels taken down, and its texture mapping units got chopped.
I've been lead to believe it can be OC'd to around 4Ghz stable without voltage or cooling changes, but we'll see how it handles in general before we look at overclocking. As for the Vid card, I knew going in on the 660 that it wasn't "top of the line" but the price point was right and it beats the pants off the old 8800GTS I was using prior.
Managed to finagle another 8GB of ram out of the deal since they just posted a promo on the board I bought... so 16gb total! Yay! New ram is: G.SKILL Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) -KM
Good Stuff! If you want to squeek the most out of the GPU go with one that can be overvolted (MSI power edition). It will get your performance closer to that of the 670. I find the guy a little annoying at times and I don't believe the video mentions if it is max settings or not for each game but you get the general idea from the graphs that are shown. A K series processor is also only ~20$ more. Food for thought. I'm glad I went with 16 Gb. I've been seeing ~10 Gb in use while playing PS2 recently.
Yeah, I missed that too when I purchased it, but as I've never been one to overclock my stuff I think I'll be fine as is. The next obvious improvement for me is a SSD to host my OS from. -KM
