Assasian, Sniper and Guerilla (Spelling) from Gigabyte...

[.Heavy]

These are three motherboards from Gigabyte. I am struggling with these boards and similar boards to choose a new build. I have tentatively settled on Assassin, hoping to use the Intel 6 core i7 990 extreme CPU and a fistful of 2200 DDR 3 triple channel ram. Never mind the video cards. I have them ready to go.

I cannot say to myself that the Assassin Motherboard is the END all BE all in gaming. I have gone back to the fundamentals. Fast CPU, Fast RAM and Fast SSD drive with video more than adequate. I would accept nothing less than Windows Experience of 7.9 and I am already there except with RAM, CPU and SSD. Killer 2100 onboard and amplified sound is a plus for BF3 footsteps.

It's going into a Lian full tower case with big fans. A whole bunch of them. This will likely be my last build for quite a few years.

I am also concerned that SATA III is not full pure across the board. You have two SATA III and then 6 SATA II. What gives?

I also am looking at nothing less than the fastest SSD. Looking at about 500/sec reads and writes. The Intel looks the best but at 600 dollars is very stiff. Might just buy one and be done with it.

Corsair is coming out with new hardware as well. The H50 CPU Cooler.

I suppose it is late at night now and I must pull firewatch for another few hours but am struggling very hard to say:

"Now this is the system that will crush BF3."

Can some one out there give me more to consider good or bad about the Assassin Board? At these prices, these boards have better be damn well worth it.

Or I go buy another 300 dollar latest and greatest board and stick 2100 killer and big sound on it for the same money.

[Major-G8tor]

Gigabyte does seem to put quality hardware into their boards with emphasis on durability.
See the factory tour:
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2011/06...factory-tour/1

The only negatives I've seen in reviews is their BIOS options are not as intuitive if you want to overclock. I've built a few PCs with Gigabyte and only "bricked" one when I had a bad BIOS flash. Now I look for dual-BIOS chips on motherboards. Nice to have a safety net.

BF3 has me thinking about an upgrade as well but I think it'll just be a video card change-out. My platform is Intel X58 and it still has some life to it IMO. Now if I was to build a new PC today, I'd start with the Z68 board since the new Intel Smart Response Technology (SSD caching) and Lucid-Virtu video switching are interesting new features. Intel fixed the initial Sandy-Bridge glitch with the SATA ports so P67 boards are an option if you don't need the Z68 features.

Bottom-line: Sandy-Bridge LGA1155 outperforms LGA1366 CPUs all around. You don't really need 6 cores if gaming is the priority. Multiple process-threading mainly benefits video editing. The Intel 2600K CPU beats Gulftown in most benchmarks I've read about and costs much less.

Just on the horizon 4Q11--Ivy Bridge (22nm CPUs) and the LGA2011 (X79) boards
AMD is coming out with "Bulldozer" CPUs but I've not read much about those yet.

[.Heavy]

Orly? That is news to me.. these wonderful new products.

I did notice that the 11xx boards outperform the 1366's and it bothered me.

Thank you for your clear and concise post, now I have several points from which to explore further. Video editing is part of the picture as well as gaming. I am going to acquire a Sony 360 Full HD camcorder soon and it's going to produce some really fat files that need horse power to process.

A gamer friend of mine by the name of "Donkey" years ago told me one simple thing about building computers.

Fast is good, but fast and stable even better. That means I have to do research to ensure that whatever Intel or AMD product for CPU etc on down is going to get the job done and the Motherboard is the foundation on everything else. I need that board to be extremely strong.

As I type this, I am looking at the Rampage III and some of the so called Military grade motherboards. I am unsure if that is marketing hype or something that is solid.

One way or another a system will be built that will hopefully crush BF3. I don't wish to build a system like I did to get BFBC2 to even run, only to learn about the horrible bottlenecks which required a rebuild with new parts.

I aim to build this thing one time and be done with it.

There is a Builder of computers for gaming that is sitting in my email box... a very tempting offer to have a system built, burned in and shipped to me 100% ready. We will see.

After all this is America, land of the free and home of those who throw sufficient amounts of Dollars to make anything happen.

[.Heavy]

After some careful thought I may not go with the 1366 Platform and stay with the 1156 due to a number of advantages.

I hope I made the right choice, oh boy...

I could wait until later in the year until the 1366's are "Caught up"

[Major-G8tor]

Heavy, LGA1155 (Sandy-Bridge) is the latest platform and includes P67 and Z68 chipsets. LGA1156 (P55) came out last year and it is phasing out due to the greater performance leap with LGA1155 socket CPUs. They do make it confusing with their socket LGA changes.

Intel does not even include P55s on their roadmap anymore:

[.Heavy]

Thank you for the map. That is a eye opener.

I got the motherboard squared away, the proc etc Next up is the ram choosing and SSD choosing. I am going to attempt to get 5 Patriot 60 gig SSD's that read and write well over 500

I may also just get two of the GTX 570's and SLI them. It depends on where the Precious Metals settle at this time of the year what with the financial markets getting all... strange due to the USA, Euro and Yen issues.

I know that I will regret not getting a PCI 4x slot as the new SSD's/Flash drives based on that socket and dispense entirely with SATA cables is going to load into a map before everyone else will.

I don't know yet if I can locate some kind of external interface that carries one 4x or 8x PCI slot to take advantage of the technology.

I am in a holding pattern. Wife is tossing a few dollars my way for this and that and I am waiting for a certain price point on the metals before converting some to cash to complete the build.

Or.... postpone the build if my Spouse does not recieve her VA money next month. We hope that wont happen.