hmm...decisions decisions! lol As attractive as Intel chips are, I cant help feel a little ripped off off if I were to go down that road, as they do have a tendency to change their sockets, whilst AMD is closing the gap and have already stated that their next line-up will still use AM3+ sockets. So for my case of future proofing, this is ideal, and a relatively low cost way of staying in the game. As my budget is always limited ( I have two kids and a wife to support on my sole income!), I don't get to plow as much money into these things anymore, hence why I researched AMD's route and as stated above, I had my eye on the current top end AMD cpu, because it is something I can afford, and have a nice machine and when time moves on can also upgrade to a second GPU in crossfire and maybe even a newer CPU, without the costly expense of getting another board and such.
although I do see both sides of the intel vs. amd argument, and don't really want to spark that debate off again!! there is enough of that here! so I will consider all the options you have suggested and will post my final decisions before I make purchase at end of week anyway.
Oh and as for the Tahiti LE, (or Tahiti 7870 XT etc.), after some research, I see it is slightly faster, but with overclocking could go quite a bit faster compared to standard 7870 running on an older chip. However, they are few and far between, and very hard to source, and can only be crossfired with another similar card, not a normal 7870, so if it's hard finding one now, when the time comes for me to expand, it could be even harder to grab one! So I will give that a miss, and stick to the aforementioned 7870 by stulid. Thanks for that info though, made for some interesting reading on chip dies and such in GPU's, and to someone looking for a single card in that price range, then yes it is a great deal!
thanks again guys and speak soon...
Cases have a cut out on the back of the mobo tray so you don't have to strip the whole system down to add it in.
