Asus Crosshair IV extreme

[chaszmyr]

I just got this board and ordered a Phenom ii x6 1090T CPU

This board supports both 3 or 4 way SLI/xFIRE

Which Card should I get... Nvidia GTX 480 or ATI Radeon 5970?

It also supports Sata 3

So I was going to get an Intel 25X 80GB SSD for OS and partition it out for a page file(20GB) the rest would be more frequently used programs and OS

I want to get (4) Hard Drives and put them in Raid 5 for mass storage

What Hard Drive would you suggest that is Sata3, 64mb cache and 6MBs tranfer rate?

Since I am also getting the Antec H-85 which has a hot swap SSD slot on the top. I figure I will get a 40GB SSD to put my games on and stuff them in the slot when ever I want to play

I was also getting the 8GB flare series by G.skill since they were made specifically for Phenom iiX6 processors at 2000Mhz. I might go all out and get 2 sets for a total of 16GB

I do alot of graphics (Maya Unlimited,Zbush and CS5) and also play alot of high end games.

So...

What Graphic Cards would you suggest for a potential 4-way set up? (GTX480 or Radeon 5970)

What Hard Drives which has 64Mb cache, Sata 3 and 6 transfer rate and works well in Raid 5?

 

[EarthDog]

What res do you game at? Im sure a single 480 or 5870 will be fine unless you run and game on multiple monitors.

What partition it out for a page file? Leave it as is, just set it to 1-2GB static (min/max the same).

Western Digital Caviar black 1TB.

Please confirm your amount of ram usage before you waste money on 16GB.

Honestly with CS5 I think you would be better off with an intel build with HT.

I also think you can only use 2 5970's in Crossfire. But I ask, why all the horsepower?? For 99.9% of people its a waste of money as scaling isnt great over 3 cards.

 

[ChanceCoats123]

The graphics cards are basically a null point once you reach that high into the performance levels. They all get the job done. End of story.

And why the hell would you set a 20gb pagefile when you're getting 8-16 gb's of ram? I dare you to try and use all 8 gb's of ram let alone need to page anything. Use the SSD for programs and set the page file for 1-2gb's as ED mentioned. As fast as SSD's are, Ram is still 10-20x faster on reads/writes/copies. SSD's have an "access time upper hand", but since all requests for hard drives go through the southbridge, the ram is actually lower in latency. Ram<Ram drive<SSD.

 

[EarthDog]

Yeah somethings a little odd here. More money than sense... but thats why he's here I imagine.

 

[chaszmyr]

Currently I have 3 monitors and looking to get a fourth
I was going to start off 8Gb ram.
I thought if I change page file settimgs I would get a faster response. It'd not uncommon for me to jse multiple programs running at the same while multi tasking

 

[chaszmyr]

Yes.. Earthdog, that's why I am here!

I like the board because of the potential in the future. I was going to start off with an ATI 5970 eyefinity at first with 8GB of Ram, if that doesn't satisfy me, then atleast I have A LOT of room to grow.

I like AMD over Intel because of the prices and from the reviews I have read, Phenem ii 1090T is not that far behind the i7, so I don't see a need to spend an extra 500 for a CPU

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

i multitask probably like few do and i barely use 8G of ram on my IV Formula and 1055T @ 3.5Ghz

i dont even bother touching the page file anymore, not since the days of XP, page file is fine left alone.

 

[chaszmyr]

Thanx.... so you've saved me about a Grand, if you guys feel 8GB of ram and 1 5970 eyefinity 6 series is enough

 

[ChanceCoats123]

Definitely. You'll absolutely love that system.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

better to buy less then more, you can always add more later if you need it, but good luck selling or refunding items if you find you dont need it

example for my usage right now:

Win 7 Pro x64

i have 87 processes going
that includes:

• Chrome with 17 tabs open
• Outlook 2010
• remote desktop to my work system
• winamp
• pidgin
• OpenVPN
• daemon tools
• malyware bytes antimalware
• MSE
• VMware workstation with a centos VM and a windows 98 VM running
• spybot S&D
• SSH client running
• MSN open, not connected

and i am using 3.95G of ram out of 8G right now and about 1-7% CPU usage and about to go play some BC2 or TF2 and i wont notice any lag or slowdowns.

only once have i gone over my 8G of ram on a past system and that was cause i had about 4 VM's running and photoshop open with a crap load of 50MB raw files.

 

[Brolloks]

Would love to see quad 5870's on this board...pics please when you have it all assembled. I plan to spend some time on the Green side on the CPU spectrum so interested to see what you can do with the 1090T.

 

[EarthDog]

Thanx.... so you've saved me about a Grand, if you guys feel 8GB of ram and 1 5970 eyefinity 6 series is enough

You will be fine...like was mentioned you can always add more.

And the reason one touches the Page file these days are b/c of SSD's. Being that most are small OS drives, ever GB you save counts. So setting the PF to 1GB static saves 3GB of space. For me on a 60GB drive, thats 5% of the space on the drive.

 

[ChanceCoats123]

+1. I run a very small PF. If I could run zero PF without issues, I would, but I got some BSOD's while running zero.

 

[QuietIce]

Thanx.... so you've saved me about a Grand, if you guys feel 8GB of ram and 1 5970 eyefinity 6 series is enough

One card will barely run three monitors and won't run four of them ...