Advice with Processor and Motherboard

[Bad boy Warrior]

A few months back i was interested in building my own 64bit PC with a i7 SandyBridge processor. A few days later i realised there was a problem with the board so i decided to hold.

Im wondering what would be a good i7 processor recommendation now (last time it was i7 2600k) although i saw a decent price (so i think) Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz Socket 1155 8MB Cache . In addition a decent motherboard too. I prefer ASUS or Gigabyte but would like to include:

Separate graphics card (not integrated)

Of course quad core

HDMI

WiFi

SATA (600 i think is the preferred option nowadays)

Bluray

USB 3.0

and any other fancy bits where possible

All opinions welcome.

Thanks

Edited June 15, 2011 by Bad boy Warrior

[pointertovoid]

You didn't tell what the use of this PC would be...

If your applications are single task, then a dual-core with a fast clock is better. I checked recently, zero progress (speed, power) was made since the E8600.

Look at the SuperPi benchmarks.

If you have multi-task uses, then why only 4 cores? And do these applications make use of the graphics card, as image and video editing increasingly does?

Also: except for video games and some special processing, the disks are more important than the Cpu / chipset / etc.

You can perfectly save on the Cpu and afford an SSD or a 10,000rpm mechanical disk, the combination is more effective for most uses.

[Bad boy Warrior]

It will be used for programming mainly with the .Net Framework. I would also need to install additional virtual machines, to test applications and every now and then i dont mind playing games.

If you have multi-task uses, then why only 4 cores? And do these applications make use of the graphics card, as image and video editing increasingly does?

I guess some apps would but i think HDMI connectivity (for TV viewing) would make more use of this??

Any more questions feel free to ask.

Thanks

Edited June 16, 2011 by Bad boy Warrior

[CoffeeFiend]

I checked recently, zero progress (speed, power) was made since the E8600.

Look at the SuperPi benchmarks.

Then you're doing it wrong. Even going by that one unique benchmark which by itself only means so much, the E8600 loses to the i7 2600k by almost 30%. If you check some other benches the E8600 loses quite badly in many real-world scenarios, from fps in games (twice the fps in L4D for example), to photoshop/acrobat processing times, encryption tasks being drastically faster. Video encoding, video editing and also rendering benefit are way faster. Even simple everyday tasks like creating a 7zip archive are 3x as fast (41s vs 122s)!

Then again, for developing & compiling .NET apps with VS2010 a plain old Core 2 Duo with enough RAM is plenty fast (still happily using C2D's for that at work & home myself)