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I7 3960k dream build

YWguide

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Nov 14, 2011
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I've been waiting for the Socket 2011 to arrive. I'm a photographer dealing with 200mb files for photoshop and lightroom editing so 6 cores will help a ton. I also do some video editing, standard browsing, and gaming. On games I want to run on one monitor 2560x1920 smooth. When I'm home my PC is on all the time so I'm looking for stable long term use but speed to keep me happy for 3-4 years. And I need it by December because its a tax deduction.

My budget is about $k4-$5k and I plan on building from the ground up. Here's the components I'm thinking.

I'm looking at the I7 3960k and want to OC it to about 4.6ghz.

CPU:Intel i7 3960k
Motherboard: Asus Rampage (maybe the sabertooth if I don't need to 4 pci-e))
Case: Cooler Master HAF 942
CD Drive: Sony BD5300s
Cooling: Corsair CWC H100
SSD: Intel 510 240 GB
Hard Drive for files: WD Caviar Black sata 6
RAM: 16gb ram quad channel (not sure brand here, would like 1600 or maybe 1866 8-9-8-24)
OS: Win 7 pro 64
Power supply: OCZ zx-1250w
Video Card 1: MSI n580gtx lighting 3GB
Video Card 2: MSI n580gtx lighting 3GB
Video Card 3: MSI GT 520

So here are my questions that I'm looking for advise.

1. I run two huge monitors. An HP 30 incher that I want to run everything at 2560x1920 hence the 2 580's SLI'ed for gaming. My 2nd monitor is a 24 inch at 1920 so from what I read I need a 3rd vid card to handle it since the 580's don't play well with two different resolution monitors. Does that sound right? I know the 580's will run at 8x but the speed difference is almost nothing.

2. Is the Corsair H100 enough to cool?

3. I look at the Intel SSD because of reliability, OCZ's are faster. What's the thought on the Ocz RevoDrive PCI-e as a boot disc instead of the Intel. They are about the same price. I think the bottleneck in photo editing will be the CPU and ram speed, with the SSD being good. The RevoDrive does have much faster speeds but I'm not saving images to that drive. Just the library cache and scratch disk.

4. I read good things on Corsair and G.skill ram. I want 16gb and fast without going too hot. What's the best option?
 
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