Hi, I have an Asus P5b deluxe with core2duo 6600 and ATI 5770 graphics. I have just ordered an Intel 520 180gb SSD because of the SSD cash-back deal, when combined with a voucher, it became too good a deal to pass on. As a result I now have a SATA3 hard drive arriving, and a motherboard that, if it doesn't have issues picking up the 520, will only run support it in SATA2 mode.
An upgrade has been tempting these last 12 months, but I figured I would wait for Ivy bridge. Looking at the early benchmarks it seems that in terms of CPU power it's absolutely wasn't worth waiting for! I could pick-up an i5 2500k/z68 and get similar performance. So I'm not too stressed about my CPU choice, but when I eventually pull the trigger it would be best to pick up a z77 board either way, right?
But I'm way out of touch with current trends and chipset technology. There are so many z77 motherboards and budget is tight-ish, so I don't want to spend £50+ on features I will never use. They all seem to have SATA3 ports, but I'm looking at the rest of the features and I'm wondering, do I need any of this? I can pick of chose many obvious things like LAN ports, wifi, bluetooth, but after that I get a bit lost.
Will anything of those higher end boards give me worthwhile benefits over the £90 Gigabyte board that appears when I sort by price on OCUK?
Are there any killer features moving from z68->z77? With Z68 the "intel smart response" technology seemed like a benefit, but I'm not seeing much on z77 that doesn't relate to hibernation (laptop stuff).
I know for example i5 2500k and Ivy Bridge have built in Graphics. But do any z77 motherboards automatically switch between it and your discrete card to save power(similar to recent mac book pros)?
I know if you have a discrete graphics card you can use the 2500k's GPU as a sort of side-processor in some applications, but do all z77 motherboards support this, or is it a premium feature?
And this is a more general question, but do people who don't run SLI graphics cards generally buy Micro-ATX now? Is micro-ATX slowly becoming the standard to replace ATX? I have one of the smallest full ATX cases (Lian Li PC-A05NB), so I'll take any change of having less physical stuff in the case.
Also is PCI-standard on it's way out? I have an Asus Xonar Essence STX PCI card - which I could trade for the ST PCIe version if that slot was becoming lecacy.
Thanks for reading this far, I know that is a bit of a wall-o-text!
An upgrade has been tempting these last 12 months, but I figured I would wait for Ivy bridge. Looking at the early benchmarks it seems that in terms of CPU power it's absolutely wasn't worth waiting for! I could pick-up an i5 2500k/z68 and get similar performance. So I'm not too stressed about my CPU choice, but when I eventually pull the trigger it would be best to pick up a z77 board either way, right?
But I'm way out of touch with current trends and chipset technology. There are so many z77 motherboards and budget is tight-ish, so I don't want to spend £50+ on features I will never use. They all seem to have SATA3 ports, but I'm looking at the rest of the features and I'm wondering, do I need any of this? I can pick of chose many obvious things like LAN ports, wifi, bluetooth, but after that I get a bit lost.
Will anything of those higher end boards give me worthwhile benefits over the £90 Gigabyte board that appears when I sort by price on OCUK?
Are there any killer features moving from z68->z77? With Z68 the "intel smart response" technology seemed like a benefit, but I'm not seeing much on z77 that doesn't relate to hibernation (laptop stuff).
I know for example i5 2500k and Ivy Bridge have built in Graphics. But do any z77 motherboards automatically switch between it and your discrete card to save power(similar to recent mac book pros)?
I know if you have a discrete graphics card you can use the 2500k's GPU as a sort of side-processor in some applications, but do all z77 motherboards support this, or is it a premium feature?
And this is a more general question, but do people who don't run SLI graphics cards generally buy Micro-ATX now? Is micro-ATX slowly becoming the standard to replace ATX? I have one of the smallest full ATX cases (Lian Li PC-A05NB), so I'll take any change of having less physical stuff in the case.
Also is PCI-standard on it's way out? I have an Asus Xonar Essence STX PCI card - which I could trade for the ST PCIe version if that slot was becoming lecacy.
Thanks for reading this far, I know that is a bit of a wall-o-text!