http://pcpartpicker.com/p/JN4W
shoot me
Seems like a good build, but I'm sure someone will come along in a few minutes and tweak it for you and give you their bias opinion of what they like.
Haha, thank you.
What will you be using it for?
Gaming, little to no video editing/rendering of any kind.
Also, games like league of legends, minecraft, d3 and maybe sc2 are games that I want to play.
Looks nice to me, although the motherboard isn't quite nice enough for any overclocking that requires voltage adjustment. However, if that isn't what you are aiming for, then you will have no issues with functionality for gaming or otherwise with this build.
What mobo would you recommend for overclocking? I probably won't oc but its nice to have the option.
It honestly depends on what kind of overclock you are trying to acheive with what kind of chip you are trying to acheive the overclock on.
If you were considering something that has enough of a discrepency between the native bus rate of the processor and the native bus rate of the motherboard (Say, for instance, putting a Phenom II into an AM3+ motherboard) then you could get a pretty substantial overclock just by raising the bus rate until the processor shared the same maximum bus rate (usually you'll look to see if the HT, or hyper-transport, is at the maximum natively supported by the motherboard.)
With the newer generation of processors from AMD, they've made it a little more difficult to just go at it that way, but they have given you an unlocked multiplier. Now when you have an unlocked multiplier, you have the ability to raise the overall clock rate of the processor without having to adjust the bus rate, and subsequently any other rates (RAM, NB, etc) but usually at the cost of needing to adjust (usually raise) the core voltage. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, up to a certain point. Usually I'd say that any overclock that requires only about 2-5% voltage increase is a very mild overclock and you should be safe in performing that on many motherboards, but anything past that and there be demons.
One of the most important specifications to try to find out about on a motherboard for overclocking would have to be the number of power phases. Unlike in a power supply where you want just a single strong 12 volt rail to power the components off of, with a motherboard you want as many power phases of as high a quality as possible. The reason for this is because these control how "clean" the power is. They temper any fluctuations within the current and ensure that the current being delivered is precisely the amount required. The more power phases you have, the better the control is and thus the less wear each individual component has for it.
As far as recommendations go, it once again has to do with how much and with what. With an AM3 chip, you don't really need that many power phases, simply because they are so easy to overclock that you don't really need to adjust the voltages very much for the CPU, so a 6 phase power regulator for the CPU would suffice. You'll find this on a select few Asus motherboards, but I'll usually wind up recommending the ASRock Extreme9 990FX board. Now, obviously, this is a premium motherboard as is denoted by its price. As such it is hard, often times, to recommend such an increase in price, but if you really must have the capacity to push your AMD powered rig to the extreme, then this is the way to go.
Wow, very informative. Thanks! I might just wait a little longer on building my rig just to get the motherboard you recommended.
Overclocking sounds pretty intimidating to me since I'm converting from console to pc gaming. So I wouldn't want to try anything that could put my computer at risk. D:
Well, I intend on building this:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/ICKd
whenever I have the money. The really funny thing about the Phenom II X6 is that it is incredibly easy to overclock, and you can pretty readily have it go over 3.5 GHz. Then you've got the fact that unlike the FX series processors which share a floating point processor between two cores, the Phenom II has a FPP for each core, so you have a TRUE 6 core processor on the X6. And if you don't want to bother with editing the multiplier, you can get the Phenom II X6 1045T for $100 and it'll readily match or beat the performance of the FX 6300 or 8350 at the same clock rates. It really does just depend on what you are trying to do with it.
My main reason for going back two generations in processor is because firstly: AMD hasn't made any particularly prominant improvements in the amount of time since they released the Thuban series chips; secondly: this chip is incredibly cheap and I don't want to spend a ton of money on a processor just to feel the need to upgrade it in a year or so when AMD releases the next great thing.