Help me with a couple of upgrades please! [resolved]

[RefaelBA]

MISSION
Help RefaelBA through this epically critical computer upgrade.

BFRIEFING
CURRENT CONFIGURATION
I currently have an intel E4400, some 2GB ram and an old Gigabyte mobo, 1.2 TB of space over 2 HDD and a GeForce 8800GTS 320MB. Everything worked pretty much okay on that setup so far, but then I got a new HD camera and when I tried to edit HD video, my computer stated giving me the finger. So it's time to upgrade, because having a camera without the ability to freakin' use it is annoying.
As you can imagine, it's been a while since I bought that PC and I didn't keep track of what's hot out there.

NEEDS
As I said, I want to edit HD video, and play games.
I will be keeping all but the CPU + MOBO + RAM.
And I'll possibly add a cooler for the CPU if needed.

BUDGET
No more than 670 US$ / 420 Quids / 470 Euro / 690 CAN$

COURSE OF ACTION
I was thinking about the i7 920 or the Q9650 for CPU (I hear Intel > AMD in video editing). I wish I had the money for something better... As for Memory, I want at least 4 GB RAM, but I don't want to suggest useless things because I don't know how to avoid a bottleneck (i.e misfit RAM to a Mobo so that they don't use their full speed).

So please go on telling me which are my best options, and hopefully you'll be seeing top class movies coming from my side of the cable soon !

[xoqolatl]

My suggestion: get a i7-920, a board like ASUS P6T or Gigabyte UD3P/UD3R and a 3x 2GB memory kit like this. Easy to put together, fun to OC, lots of power for rendering. When looking for a motherboard pay attention to: brand (choose the one with best RMA service in your country, best build quality and best support), connectivity options (lots of USB and SATA, dual LANs etc) and price. Don't pay attention to auto overclocking features, magical tropical-forest-saving software, support for more than 2 video cards. If you get any money left get a quality tower type CPU cooler.
LMK if you need more specific suggestions or help with mobo settings.

[RefaelBA]

My suggestion: get a i7-920, a board like ASUS P6T or Gigabyte UD3P/UD3R and a 3x 2GB memory kit like this. Easy to put together, fun to OC, lots of power for rendering. When looking for a motherboard pay attention to: brand (choose the one with best RMA service in your country, best build quality and best support), connectivity options (lots of USB and SATA, dual LANs etc) and price. Don't pay attention to auto overclocking features, magical tropical-forest-saving software, support for more than 2 video cards. If you get any money left get a quality tower type CPU cooler.
LMK if you need more specific suggestions or help with mobo settings.

I heard the OC the i7-920 should be absolutely avoided unless you have decent cooling (beyond stock). Are you saying that I can OC it with stock cooling?

By this point I pretty much made my mind on the 920.
Now I just need to make sure I don't get a bottleneck with Ram and Mobo, how can I check that?

[whiffen]

No stock coolers are ever allowed to ship if they cannot preform well enough at stock settings. People who have massive erections for hardware think its not good until the CPU temps are below freezing, but honestly you aren't going to risk any damage until at least over 100 Celsius, but the computer will automatically shut itself down much sooner than this.

There is some headroom for OCing on stock coolers but I wouldn't go over 0.5Ghz.

At this time with Triple channel DDR3 your not going to find it easy to get bottlenecked. A 6GB module of any speed and latency should be more than enough. Feel free to get some faster ones with less latency though, its not much more expensive.

And find a nice ASUS or Gigabyte board. You can't really be bottlenecked by a LGA 1156 board. The difference between most of them in performance is negligible and your better off spending more on the CPU and Memory than it. The higher end boards do sport some better features, usually to do with overclocking and other nifty features and do transfer data faster but its only minor.

You can't go wrong but the ASUS P7P55D- and GIGABYTE GA-P55- boards looks good.

Whoops, should have made sure the i7-920 wasn't a LGA 1366 first. Anyway that socket type is abandon you might be better off with LGA 1156 if you would like to upgrade the CPU one day. I guess the Intel Core i7-860 would be your LGA 1156 counterpart. When it comes down to it though the i7 920 is the better of the two.

[xoqolatl]

Anyway that socket type is abandon you might be better off with LGA 1156 if you would like to upgrade the CPU one day. I guess the Intel Core i7-860 would be your LGA 1156 counterpart. When it comes down to it though the i7 920 is the better of the two.

LGA 1366 is not abandoned. It's a high end platform, taking place of what was X38 and X48 chipsets. I7-860 is more expensive than i7-920 and only slightly faster in single threaded apps due to more aggresive Turbo. The only Intel CPUs worth considering right now are the bottom models in a line: i3-530, i5-750, i7-920. 920 > 750 because of HyperThreading, which is great especially for rendering. LGA1366 has a bright future: it's the only Intel platform that is not limited by memory subsystem or PCI-E lanes. All kinds of CPUs are coming for LGA1366 in the near future, including 6-core chips (let me tell you, 12 threads at 4+ GHz is the mother of all home rendering machines).

About stock cooler: yes, you can OC a 920 with it... a bit. Mind you: i7-960, which is clocked at 3333 MHz (666 MHz more) is using the same stock cooler as 920. However, I myself don't consider stock cooler to be comfortably silent (esp. with CPU overclocked) and I don't consider 3,33 GHz on a 920 to be a good overclock (think 3,8 - 4,2 depending on CPU and cooling).

About RAM: I'll tell you something you already know: lots of RAM = cool. For productivity (rendering, Photoshop, virtual machines, coding etc) get at least 6 GB. Now, 4 GB modules are scarce and expensive, and running 6 modules fast is a PITA on most motherboards, so 3x 2 GB is the only easy option (6 modules are fine as long as you are not afraid of BIOS settings).

[whiffen]

...

Sorry, my information was wrong xD For some reason I remember reading somewhere that the 1366 slot was an architecture the manufacturers didn't like and so it was revised into 1156. But yeah there will be 4 icore socket types, the 1366 may be the most future proof, the only one surpassing it being for high end servers.

[Major Banter]

MILITARY TERMINOLOGY FAIL

A debrief is post-mission. A brief is pre-mission. Sorry I can't contribute otherwise, as far as I know with my rig, "this goes in here and makes it fast"

[RefaelBA]

LGA 1366 is not abandoned. It's a high end platform, taking place of what was X38 and X48 chipsets.

Let's see if I got the right lesson here:
LGA 1366 is a sort of architecture (I guess) that's actually pretty good (like how Core 2 had those sockets, and some were better than others, right?)

So basically 920 uses LGA 1366 which is pretty good, so I should grab it indeed just like I thought.
I noticed that the 1366 boards have different chipsets, something like X58, seems badass.
I think I'll take 4GB of the slowest DDR3 RAM because I will barely have enough for a 1366 Board and the 920 alone. Perhaps I'll expand that in the future.

You can't go wrong but the ASUS P7P55D- and GIGABYTE GA-P55- boards looks good.

I looked into those and they use 1156 if I understood it right. Any recommendations on a nice 1366 board?

How about the Gigabyte EX58-UD3R? It's pretty cheap for a 1366 but I think it will do the trick:
s1366 Core i7, Intel X58, DDR3 2000+, 3xPCI-E‎

BEHOLD THE COMPUTER I HAVE ASSEMBLETH
Core i7-920 (Tray)
Gigabyte EX58-UD3R <-- Badass!!
2x2GB G.Skill F3-10666CL9D-4GBRL 1333

I can get every piece apart for a total of ~737$.
I will be getting the new system in a month, perhaps prices will lower a little by then. I like this setup, it seems far better than the 1156 setup I had in mind and it's very open for future upgrades because of the Mobo.
What do you think?

[xoqolatl]

Let's see if I got the right lesson here:
LGA 1366 is a sort of architecture (I guess) that's actually pretty good (like how Core 2 had those sockets, and some were better than others, right?)

Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs are all built on the same microarchitecture - one of the cores in Core i5-750 is the same core as one of the four in i7-920. Now, all those CPUs use two different platform architectures (platform = motherboard + CPU + memory). Core i7-8x0, Core i5 and Core i3 use socket LGA1156, have an integrated two channel RAM controller and integrated 20 lane PCI-E controller. Core i7-9x0 series uses socket LGA1366, they have an integrated three channel RAM controller, but don't have a PCI-E controller. That means PCI-E controller is outside the CPU, in the northbridge - X58. X58 has 36 PCI-E lanes of which 4 are used to connect to the southbridge and 32 are split into PCI-E slots (16x + 16x or 16x + 8x + 8x for example). All LGA1156 CPUs have 20 PCI-E lanes, which means 4 to the southbridge and 16x for your GPU (or 8x + 8x for two GPUs). Core i7-800 and Core i7-900 CPUs are almost the same except the platform difference. LGA1366 is the eterprise, high end version, for people who want or need most connectivity options for lots of GPUs or RAID controllers or similar devices. LGA1156 is a mainstream platform for people with one GPU.
I don't advise against LGA1156, but the best CPU for your needs and in your price range happens to be i7-920, which uses LGA1366 socket.

I think I'll take 4GB of the slowest DDR3 RAM because I will barely have enough for a 1366 Board and the 920 alone. Perhaps I'll expand that in the future.

Form what I've seen on newegg, the sum you posted in 1st post should be enough for a decent 6 GB kit, a 920 and Gigabyte UD3R.

How about the Gigabyte EX58-UD3R? It's pretty cheap for a 1366 but I think it will do the trick:
s1366 Core i7, Intel X58, DDR3 2000+, 3xPCI-E‎

Nice board. Only board that comes close to it's bang per buck ratio is perhaps Foxconn Flaming Blade, but Gigabyte has so much better support, and you can be sure you'll get BIOS updates for as long as it's needed. I can't say the same about Foxconn.
I'm not sure about that, but there is a EX58A-UD3 incoming (A means SATA 6 GB/S and USB3.0), ETA around one month. It will probably be a bit more expensive. Anyway I wouldn't hold my breath.

[RefaelBA]

Thanks for the lesson

Form what I've seen on newegg, the sum you posted in 1st post should be enough for a decent 6 GB kit, a 920 and Gigabyte UD3R.

I don't know if I should order from newegg, I never ordered any computer internals from abroad (I live in Israel). If anything happens during shipment or after a while, there's no one to turn to, while buying locally has the benefit of warranty and immediate response. Except that, newegg could be charging high for shipping. I'll check it out anyway.

[SotaPoika]

Gigabyte UD3R fucked me big time. Bluescreen and stuff happened at least once in a few days. Of course it could've been just bad piece for me, but seriously, ASUS is the way to go. Also, UD3R has only 4 ram slots, while ASUS P6T DELUXE has 6.

[Major Banter]

BFRIEFING is not an improvement. Sorry to butt in again.

But it did make me laugh.

[xoqolatl]

Well, you posted three different currencies so I chose newegg because it's prices are usually close to MSRPs.

[RefaelBA]

Gigabyte UD3R fucked me big time. Bluescreen and stuff happened at least once in a few days. Of course it could've been just bad piece for me, but seriously, ASUS is the way to go. Also, UD3R has only 4 ram slots, while ASUS P6T DELUXE has 6.

Oh man, that sucks. But you know, this board scored 9/10 in the reviews I read so far (and it was more than one). So my guess is that you had a cooling problem or something like that. But I trust this board to be pretty amazing, and especially for its price, it's a bargain.

BFRIEFING is not an improvement. Sorry to butt in again.

But it did make me laugh.

I don't see how's it NOT an improvement, if it's correct and that's what you recommended in the first place!

Well, you posted three different currencies so I chose newegg because it's prices are usually close to MSRPs.

Yeah well, Newegg isn't shipping internatoinally Thanks anyway. I'll buy it over here, and in the future I will add more RAM when things will get sluggish. I don't really need 6GB at the moment anyway.

[Major Banter]

Spelling fail my friend. Spelling fail of epic proportion.