In no way cheaping out on power supply... it's a well respected brand and I ran the power numbers through a calculator. It estimated a 650 would be sufficient with headroom, I bumped it up to 750 to be safe. These new generation chips are way more efficient than the old crap I have now.
The biostar board is the biggest thing I'm questioning. I'd like to get the Z68 chipset so it has the SSD caching feature, but I can't justify spending an extra $70 to get a better brand name and a bunch more I/O I will never use. Wanting to be able to crossfire also limits my options.
What would you recommend for a cooler? It came recommended in the previous month's tom's hardware review for the mid-budget build. They changed it up for the most recent month for a cheaper cooler and got crappy results. The hyper 212 seemed to do a pretty good job.
Specs on the 6850 are available from google. It's a pretty middle of the road card, already slightly overclocked, good cooler. I also considered getting a single 6950 2GB instead but it's hard to justify paying that much for a single card, and I think the crossfire setup will meet my goals just fine.
Just so you know I'm not bashing or anything, its just Ive seen one to many offset builds and granted I haven't been the business for a few years but recently had some guys come back to get a hardware refresh on there builds. At the end of the day build what your budget allows but from those gpu's I can see you have some play room. LOL
Corsair is a great power supply brand! BUT that being said the HX series is the reason why. AX is better but that's higher end. TX well okay sure it isn't bad, but honestly i'm ust happy its not a CX... I like cable management so Modular is +++
I was wondering what the specs were on that specific Ice model. I know what the reference cards run, but you can't just say its a 6850 because there are a good 20 different versions of the card. I mean what are the clocks to start with? Is it a 1gig card or a 2 gig? Do you plan on OC the gpu?
On the cooler topic ya sure hyper 212 is fine for day to day use but your talking about running new edge games on 1920.. settings. For example if your trying to get 60 fps out of BF3 on all high settings and you do a decent OC that poor little cooler with kill itself
The reason why I said 750TX might not be enough is for when you overclock and turn up the voltages. Ill look into it but idk what the Rail setup is on it. While yes the 1155 socket is more efficient, depending on how high you want to overclock you still have to ramp up the volts a bit. Now sure being a smaller footprint chip the temps won't be crazy, just don't expect a 4.0-4.5ghz with great temps.
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