It's time for me to seek desktop advice, Mark II

[Pedrito]

I forgot: at the first boot, the monitor remained black and the pc was rather noisy, I was WTF because one of the reasons to upgrade was to get rid of my old guinea pig-propelled and extremely noisy pc.
Checked everyting, and the noise was coming from the video card fan.  I powered only one of the two ports I found on the vid card, because there were no instructions about it in the box, and because I thought I've read the two plugs were to be used in case of SLI.
Not true, or maybe not completely true: after having powered the second plug too, it started working, and it got very silent. :whew:

L.

[Norgy]

I know this seems redundant, but reading the manual sometimes actually helps. 

[Pedrito]

I forgot: at the first boot, the monitor remained black and the pc was rather noisy, I was WTF because one of the reasons to upgrade was to get rid of my old guinea pig-propelled and extremely noisy pc.
Checked everyting, and the noise was coming from the video card fan.  I powered only one of the two ports I found on the vid card, because there were no instructions about it in the box, and because I thought I've read the two plugs were to be used in case of SLI.
Not true, or maybe not completely true: after having powered the second plug too, it started working, and it got very silent. :whew:

L.

I've spent half of the evening reading manuals, in fact it all went hunky dory 

L.

[Pedrito]

I have a problem with the front Usb 3.0 panel that came with the motherboard; it works only at times, sometimes it seems it conflicts with the wireless LAN receiver, that is an USB (2.0) one. I'll explore the matter in more detail.

Installed the XFAST Usb utility by ASRock, they promise it speeds up both usb 2.0 and 3.0 transfer rates, but it's stopping my mouse from working, so I've uninstalled it.

L.

[Norgy]

 

Driver/BIOS update?

[Pedrito]

It seems an issue of the USB 2.0/3.0 chipset drivers (Etron for the 3.0, dunno for the 2.0), they're working on it.

I think I've the last BIOS update, or at least I had it up to two days ago: I'll check for new updates

L.

[Pedrito]

Update for Kat:

The machine is a beast, I did not overclock it yet, but it's performing exceptionally well nonetheless. Not playing FPSs, but all the games I tried now run at max settings without an itch: Starcraft 2, Civ V, Dragon Age I. Running at 1280X1024 on my old monitor though: when I'll change it, I'll post here the performance.

I heartily recommend getting a SSD drive for OS and main applications, it's really another world of speed 

The PC is extremely silent, so much that sometimes I forget to turn it off when I go to sleep.

Overall I'm very satisfied 

L.

[katmai]

Update for Kat:

[Pedrito]

Hit the post button too early 

[Norgy]

The 2500k has turbo boost and "overclocks" itself by a few hundred mHz when needed.

I broke down and bought a Sabertooth P67 and an i7-2600k. It's a beast. The real amazement, apart from synthetic tests placing it neck to neck with the i7-980X in terms of performance (the price gap between them is a Ford vs a Lamborghini), is temperature-wise. The i7-950 runs hot and the X58 motherboard runs hot even in an Antec 1200. This does not. I have set the fans to silent and added an aftermarket cpu cooler and it's a breezy 10 degrees above ambient when idling and Prime95 stress testing led to the cores reaching 60 C, or 40 above ambient.

I see no need for the "enthusiast" Sandy Bridge coming out this Q4 when the 2500 and 2600 processor really offer almost unlimited potential due to their low wattage and energy efficiency. Right now, the main bottleneck for more FPS is my GTX 580, which is overclocked. And since I don't play FPS games much, I really don't care. The DirectX 11 title Shogun 2 does stress the card quite a bit with max settings. 

[Ed Anger]

Just ordered me a AMD X6 with 6GB Ram and a Raedon 5670 from Dell for 600 bucks. Hopefully it'll last 3-4 years like my old quad core did. If I don't have to upgrade anything in it like the last one, I'll be happy.

[Norgy]

HD 5670 seems a tad weak for 3D gaming but more than enough for most other graphic stuff. Like HD porn. Upgrading it to a cheap HD 6870 would give you reasonable 3D performance at a pleasant price.

[Ed Anger]

HD 5670 seems a tad weak for 3D gaming but more than enough for most other graphic stuff. Like HD porn. Upgrading it to a cheap HD 6870 would give you reasonable 3D performance at a pleasant price.

They way I was figuring it was it'll allow me to annoy people in Team Fortress 2 and at least play Shogun. Plus, for 600 bucks? I had to jump on that.

[Ed Anger]

Oh boy. I get to play follow the Fed Ex tracker for 3 days.

[Norgy]

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