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what would be better for games?

To be honest, and this is only my opinion. You are better not spending money on the chance you could overclock futher especially since you have a good overclock at the moment. Even if it does work and you get an extra few 100 mhz it wont make much of a difference. I doubt the 4th core would unlock on another board if it wont on this one you have now, if it would you would be able to get it going at a low clock on this board.

If you do have some spare money let what you have tide you over, start up a pile of money to go toward a full upgrade get your self a Sandy 2500k board and ram for £300 and let that last you a good 5+ years like the old q6600 seem to have lasted (and still go quite strong).
 
To be honest, and this is only my opinion. You are better not spending money on the chance you could overclock futher especially since you have a good overclock at the moment. Even if it does work and you get an extra few 100 mhz it wont make much of a difference. I doubt the 4th core would unlock on another board if it wont on this one you have now, if it would you would be able to get it going at a low clock on this board.

If you do have some spare money let what you have tide you over, start up a pile of money to go toward a full upgrade get your self a Sandy 2500k board and ram for £300 and let that last you a good 5+ years like the old q6600 seem to have lasted (and still go quite strong).

i did think that clicky but finding £300 in one go is not easy :( so thought maybe the mobo/cheap cpu then sell my current bits might get me there. but finding a cheap 1155 mobo with 2 pci-e slots thats not rubbish is proving hard :(
 
can get that mobo for £91 :) but had bad experiences with gigabyte and the old i7s so has put me off a bit. dont need ram, i have 12GB already and a spare 2GB stick i can use in a rebuild of my old stuff, so just need mobo and cpu for now so i can get up and running, sell my current mobo/cpu in a new case with win7 and all installed and try to fund a 2500k, cooler and maybe SSD upgrade. but i dont know how quickly my stuff would sell and for how much, so dont want to be stuck with a slow 1155 for months on end.
 
You should just save for an upgrade then, you could be sorted for £250, and think about an SSD later, you need more horsepower before you start thinking about them.

As for Gigabyte I have had 5 boards of theirs and build another 5 systems for family and never had trouble with them over the years, MSI on the other hand seem well liked but its the only manufacturer I have had a problem with, so go figure, think its luck of the draw rather than manufacturer.

Curious as to why you think the Gigabyte is a slow board?
 
dont think they are slow boards, just through my job we have had nothing but problems, and i did personally too, with the old i7s BSOD all the time with gigabyte mobos. never had issues with any other manufacturer. we also get a lot of skt775 and AM3 gigabyte mobo issues too. never had to RMA an asrock or biostar mobo, but gigabyte seems to be a monthly occurance.
 
For some reason a lot of the boards will do crossfire only and not SLI so having your 6850s you get much more choice at the budget end than if you had Nvidia cards. There are plent of other manufacturers around that price too so plenty of choice. (editied out the part where I went braindead and put a load of nonsense)
 
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Good choice, your system should be good enough for this round of games, and save some cash for a beast to run games showcased at E3 for later :) have fun
 
yeh, think i might look at possibly getting the amount of HDDs i have down (ditch the raid maybe and go for 1 1TB drive. improve airflow in the case and see where that gets me. i just miss the courrier bringing me some shiney new parts to play with. and build a 2500k at work which is sitting on the shelf and i know it will sit there for a long time as no one in our town appreiciates good technology :(
 
just noticed you got x fire gpu, your cpu is a bottle neck i would get a phenom quad and o/c that to 4ghz,you can pick one up for a ton, job done,cheap up grade to tide you over, and loose 8gb of memory, you dont need it
 
decided to go over to a sandybridge setup afterall. will do it in stages though, so will get a decent mobo (ASRock Z68-Extreme4) and a Pentium G620, looking at bench tests its around similar spec to mine. will then build my old mobo/cpu up as a pc to sell to then upgrade the cpu.
i just cant justify £100+ on a cpu that would gain me nothing long term as i will still only have an AM3 mobo, so when BD comes out i would need a cpu and mobo, whereas going SB i can get a nice mobo now, and it will still be upgradable to some ivy bridge chips.
 
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