What is your current system? If it is good enough for another 6 months or so it makes no sense to upgrade right now with Win8 and the performance of Piledriver up in the air. 

If you can wait the prices of video cards will no doubt drop considerably when NV releases Keppler.

Win8 has a conventional interface like Win7 as well. it isn't just for tablets. W8 will probably be launched with exclusive games as well.

Looking back at my notes for the Bulldozer launch (AMD Bulldozer Review: FX-8150 Gets Tested), AMD was very enthusiastic about FX’s performance in Battlefield 3 (multiplayer beta, at the time). And no wonder—Battlefield 3's single-player campaign doesn’t care if you’re using a $130 Core i3 or $315 Core i7. It doesn’t care if you come armed with two Hyper-Threaded cores or four Bulldozer modules. It just. Doesn’t. Care. 

The multiplayer does care, it uses all the cores. It is already known that singleplayer dosen't scale with more cores.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Yeah, that's the review I saw, too.  Manufactured by Sirfa, 85 C Teapo capacitors, only 552 W on the +12 V rail for a "650 W" power supply, +3.3 V and +5VSB voltages barely stayed within spec, over 60 mV ripple on the +12 V rail.  None of those are horrible.  It's not like it's a Diablotek piece of junk.

But if that's what you're looking to spend, you can do a lot better for cheaper, unless you really want modularity:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139020

you have kicked my ass in power supply knowledge. I'll go with your reccomendations. 

Hardware Secrets does write good power supply reviews.  But they're pretty generous with their awards, so "golden award" isn't really high praise.  If Hardware Secrets gives a power supply a golden award and Hard OCP rates it a "fail", they're not necessarily contradicting each other if they're both borderline cases.

-----

So you're saying, don't believe the processor reviews on tech review sites.  But instead, trust what some random person on an Internet forum said.  And that's an overclock of over 50% if you want 4.8 GHz on an FX-8120.  A Core i5 2500K will overclock pretty well, too, you know.

Today, games might typically scale to about three cores.  A Core i5 2500K wins easily over an FX-8120 at three cores.  And it would still win if games scaled perfectly to four cores.  Or five.  Or six.  Even at eight cores, it would still at least be competitive.  It's going to be a long, long time before games assume have something stronger than four fast cores.

In the meantime, games that struggle with a processor will tend to do so because they can't take advantage of enough cores.  A Core i5 2500K will do wellin those games, too.  Will an FX-8120?  Actually, it often will.  But not always, and not as well as a Core i5 2500K

2500k dosen't play BF3 as well as FX-8120/8150. It isn't as smooth. This trend of heavily threaded games will continue. Thoes benchmarks point out that when paired with fast ram, NB overclocking, and cpu overclocking the FX does not bottleneck in lightly threaded games so that's a moot point with the components I selected. Go read the customer comments on newegg, people are really impressed with FX 8 cores.

It's just my opinion all I can do is point out customer reviews and that thread that shows FX is pretty good when OC. And is better at multitasking. Weather he buys 8120 now and ebays it for 100$ when Piledriver comes out or spends 350$ on an I7 price won't be much difference.In the end I think Piledriver will stomp Sandy bridge 4 cores. Win8 will make it even worse. 

In the end people have a vested interest in their platform of choice. I prefer to embrace multithreading because I don't need insane single threaded performance. I get plenty of FPS on my x6 @ 4ghz. I will continue to enjoy it as games get more and more threaded.

Rosewill hive review. Even though it has some Teapo caps they are 105c. Ripple was fine he said even overloaded 780w. he gave it excelent rating/value

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Rosewill-HIVE-650-W-Power-Supply-Review/1460/1

And ya I wasn't thinking about crossfire for gaming because as an avid FPS player I would never use it due to microstutter.

The point I'm making about FX-8 cores is when Win8 comes out and newer games tend to use more cores it will be better to have an overclocked FX than any 1155 chip. Older games not heavily threaded won't be bottlenecked by Bulldozer, especially with a nice OC and cooler. Win8 uses core parking so power usage will drop also. If you looked at thoes benchmarks in the anandtech thread you would see even OC bulldozer does very well vs 2500k. 

Why should the OP plan on socket 1155 especially when Both Win8 and industry trends are moving toward more threads. Even if he popped 350$ down on a 2600k/2700k he is still stuck at 4 cores with worse multitasking than 8120 for 5 years. 

If you wont be replacing your comp for a long time I have made a build that should be good for quite a while.

Motherboard ASUS M5A99X EVO AM3+ AMD 990X SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 145$

Processor  AMD FX-8120 Zambezi 3.1GHz Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core 200$

Ram  G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 60$

Hard drives HITACHI 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB SATA 6 | OCZ Agility 3 60GB SATA III MLC (SSD) 170$

Power supply Rosewill HIVE Series HIVE-650 650W 85$

Case Rosewill CHALLENGER Black Gaming ATX Mid Tower 55$

OS Windows 7 home Premium 100$

CPU heatsink, XIGMATEK Gaia SD1283 120mm Long Life Bearing 30$

Video card, SAPPHIRE 11196-00-40G Radeon HD 7950 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 450$

Total 1295$

Some notes on components

FX 8120/8150 have smoother gameplay than the 4 core Intel 1155 processors. Don't pay attention to benchmarks they really are better than the Intel K series. And you will be upgrading to Piledriver 8 cores anyway. Windows 8 with SMT will boost gaming even more. 

The Rosewill PS is excellent and can pull more 750ish watts

The heatsink will pretty much let you OC to your hearts content, Buy another 120mm fan for the back of it if you need to.

The SSD hard drive is big enough for your OS and a few regularly played games, all you need. The speed is worth it.

IMO do not get socket 1155, Trust me if BF3 shows us anything is that new games will use more cores, and Intels K series hiccups when it has too many threads, and 1155 is EOL no processor upgrades past 4 cores. You said you are planning on the system lasting 5 years. Intels 4 cores will not age as well as the AMD 8 cores.

Some FX8150 overclocked benchmarks, it does very well.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2225753

SLI and Crossfire have what is known as microstutter. Unless you are running Eyefinity/multiple monitors it isn't reccomended.

If you do build your own PC I would not reccomend socket 1155(I-2500k/2700k..etc) With games having more and more threads Hyperthreading really sucks due to it wiping the primary threads cache whenever it is idle/waiting for dependencies. And with 1155 you are stuck with 4 cores so any future upgrade will have to include a new motherboard.

AMD's FX-8150 has lower IPC per core but with 8 cores and Windows 8 supposedly comming late 2012 going with FX-8150 over the 2500k would be a serious bonus to the longevity of your system. Especially with Piledriver due out in a few months.

And I agree with the 2tb drives Quiz pointed out. Unless you have a serious need to download every anime and keep them on disk no one needs that much space right now. it'd be better to invest in a fast OCZ vertex 3 SSD.

With newer dual fan direct pipe heatsinks there really is no reason to water cool. My Phenom x6 at 4ghz hardly breaks 50c.

In bios reduce your buss speed to 100, then set your ram and NB to as close to current values as possible. You may need to fiddle a bit since the 925 isn't unlocked but this will tell you if Tera is CPU bound or GPU bound.

Or reduce your gpu clocks by 25% and note the framerate differences. 

If you can OC your processor it will also show what the problem is. with aftermarket air cooler it should do over 3.5ghz. Also your NB should do 2.5ghz or more with a TINY!!!!!!!!! bit more voltage.

If it's CPU bound and you are at stock clocks then OC. if not then GPU upgrade.

If anything Blizzard will cater to AMD since they already work together. Bulldozer already supports FMA4, and Piledriver will support FMA3.

IMO AM3 has quite a bit more longevity than  1155 with Piledriver 8 cores and Win8 SMT around the corner. 

Originally posted by drbaltazar
Only the apu Re recommanded on amd side proc.so go intel .yes even i3 are better. stick to 1155 socket .gpu i wou get best dx 9 gpu.watch premade with theze will be cheaper.make sure mobo support pcie3

You are seriously deluded if you think I3 is better than FX-4100.

FX 4100 beats I3 in just about every real world situation there is. 

I3 overclocks like crap, you's be lucky to hit 3.5ghz, FX can hit 4.5 fairly easy and has more cores.

Go actually look at the benchmarks. Even on stock clocks I3 gets beat pretty badly.

And why would you reccomend socket 1155? it's being phased out and is stuck at 4 cores. Take a look at SMT improvments for Win8 already 10% boost on WoW which is a pretty worst case scenario for SMT and gaming.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8150-zambezi-bulldozer-990fx,3043-23.html

That motherboard is out of stock.

I would get the 

ASRock 970 EXTREME4

10 dollars more and is probably a better board.

If you must stay under 700 at all costs this is a good one.

GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

If you can squeeze another 30 dollars into the build I would get 

XIGMATEK LOKI SD963 92mm HYPRO Bearing CPU Cooler

It would allow you to really push the FX clocks. Especially if you add another fan to it. And if you plan on upgrading the CPU in the future it will come in handy.

man people are still going on about raiding.......get over it, GW2 will never have instanced raids.....GW2 maid their raids a part of the open world.

Originally posted by Quizzical

AMD's high end desktops use the same dies as their servers.  There's no 10-core die coming on the server side, either.  There had been plans for it, but it was cancelled, reportedly because it was supposed to use DDR4 and DDR4 isn't ready.

Ya that all is pretty correct except Delhi the Desktop variant is being made on Glofo 32 SHP strained SOI. Might be the same die as the others but it's definately a higher performance process. Looking through all I can find Bulldozer was also made on this process (Desktops)

Vishera is going to use the same process node as Zambezi.  It will be a more mature process node, and that may let AMD squeeze a few hundred MHz more clock speed out of it.  But it's not a new process node, as Global Foundries doesn't have 28 nm SHP ready yet and won't for quite some time.

There is no way that Vishera is going to catch Sandy Bridge in IPC.  Maybe it will catch Thuban in IPC, but that's a long way away from Sandy Bridge.  It's likely that Vishera will clock higher than Sandy Bridge, and so narrow some of the remaining gap in single-threaded performance that way.  But Ivy Bridge is still going to be the king of single-threaded performance.  Vishera might beat the top Ivy Bridge part in programs that scale well to eight cores.

Ya the core IPC won't quite match SB but when you add in CMT for such tasks as gaming or heavily threaded workloads it should come out even. +30% from core improvments & SMT in W8 should help a bunch. But I agree with a single thread IB will come out ahead. Look again at the WoW Windows 8 comparison, More heavily threaded games could really surprise us with the performance gains in piledriver.

Sry I was REALLY sleepy when I wrote that last post

Google >"10 core piledriver 2012" there should be plenty of links in 2 pages.

Edit (Oops I never looked closely at the revised roadmap)

10 core piledriver is only for servers.

the 8 core Delhi AM3 variant will be using strained SOI to allow 20% higher frequencies. So....

+15% Bulldozer > Piledriver

+15-20% Strained SOI

+10-15% for windows 8 "SMT"

So the low ball figure between Bulldozer on W7 and Piledriver on W8 is around 40% more performance.

Given the performance numbers between W7 and W8 for WoW

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8150-zambezi-bulldozer-990fx,3043-23.html

80 fps multiplied by 1.4 gives 112fps beating the 2500k 

Multiplying 2500k's FPS of 96 by 1.09 gives 104fps bringing SB from 3.3ghz to 3.6

So if all goes well Piledriver will indeed compete with Sandy bridge in IPC since WoW is not a heavily threaded game. And it has 8 cores.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Look at the dates.  AMD had planned on making a 10-core processor for servers, though it supposedly wasn't going to be Socket C32/G34 like the ones they have out now.  If they have to change the socket for servers, then they likely would have had to do so for desktops as well, so it probably wouldn't have fit Socket AM3+ anyway.

That was cancelled, however.  Instead, their next generation will be basically the same as Zambezi, except that AMD will try to fix whatever went wrong.  For example, it will have Piledriver cores rather than Bulldozer.  The good news is that it will fit Socket AM3+.

That was the cancelled bulldozer opteron part. AMD moved up Piledriver to Q3 2012 and confirmed an AM3+ part since Bulldozer has some problems. Hell if all goes smoothly we might see Piledriver near 1H 2012 depending on respins.

Originally posted by Loke666

Not the processor I would have choosed for that price,  while it isn´t really bad a I9 2600 is a lot more priceworthy and I also would have gotten a 120 GB SSD or at least 80GB, 60 just is a bit too little if you want a few favorite games installed on it as well as the OS.

And what PSU did you get BTW? Did you get a coolermaster with the case or what? How powerful?

It is a pretty OK game computer that should last you 3 years or so, but not exactly the build I would have put up myself with that sum. I would probably have lowered the ram to 8Gb as well on 2 4Gb chips so it would be easy to upgrqade later and I might have saved a few bucks from the start on a smaller HD like 500GB or so. Things like that is easy to upgrade later if needed, changing the SSD isn´t.

I tend to be cheap on the case as well as long as it is large, heck I have my water cooled hexa core in a 10-15 year old chieftech maxi tower that looks anything but fancy by now. :)

I7 k series is socket 1155 and is EOL stuck at 4 cores. The point of my build is to gear up for the AMD 10 cores comming later this year.

And I would have to lean toward Capstone power supplies after reading a lot of PSU reviews lately ^^

Unless you horde anime like a packrat or never uninstall anything a 500GB is the sweet spot if you want to use a Raid in the future IMO. Personally I would buy 320gb WD hard drives because of their notorious reliability. Although 1tb drives are becomming very inexpensive. Don't trust seagate.

Drak you would be better off going a bit conservative on the processor. IMO you should go with AMD 990X/FX motherboard, A relatively inexpensive FX-6100, 8gb of fast ram, 500GB hard drive, 64gb Vertex 3 SSD.

And the radeon 7970.

Don't panic because later this year you can pop in a 10 core AMD Piledriver into the exact same system.

In the end you will have a much better system, for less money.

But you already bought the system. have fun.

I have never had problems removing TIM paste using a Qtip.

Just use a Qtip being careful around the edge of the CPU. itl rub off mirror clean after a few qtips.

Please download OHM and report the temperatures you get while playing.

http://openhardwaremonitor.org/

Also run Wprime or the beta multicore Folding at home client to test system stability.

Ooo it's a revised list. yup Zosma is on there.

the one I looked at on the GB site didn't have it on there.

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2722#

I'll edit my above post a bit.

....wait a minute if he has a Rev 1.0 motherboard the power is 3+1 vs the 2.0 which is 4+1 and has an upgraded VRM. People have Phenom 965 working fine in the 1.0 motherboards so any 95w cpu should be fine as long as it's in the list Quizical supplied.

Technically with the F7 bios update it will work with AM3. 

But if you get the Zosma you will need the F8F beta bios or later.

Thst mobo dosen't oficially support Zosma. I wouldn't chance it.....Disreguard, Zozma is supported.

AMD Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor  Or

AMD Phenom II X4 960T Zosma 3.0GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor 

That's about the best you will find IMO, You might be able to clock it a bit higher without frying the Mobo since the 955 is 95w and comes at 3.2ghz

If you can OC your Ram to 1066 that also might help since ddr2-800 probably bottlenecks a quad core a bit.

Also try bumping up your north bridge speed a bit.

The 925 dosent include a heatsink.  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835200012

The Zosma is probably a better choice since the NB can be clocked quite a bit higher if your MB supports NB overclocking. It can help speed up Ram access bit.