Quick question. I've decided to change my motherboard and CPU to Intel because I don't foresee AMD coming out with any better AM3+ chips. Bulldozer and Piledriver have been mediocre at best.
I was wondering if an ASUS P8Z77-V Pro ($194.99) and an Intel i7-3770 ($289.99) would be a great replacement to my ASUS Sabertooth 990FX and my AMD FX-8120?
If you know of a better Motherboard and chip for a gamer (non-enthusiast) that is competitive in price that'd be great to know. I was looking for the LGA 1155 because it seemed to run cheaper and still supported 3rd gen Core i7. If LGA 2011 is the future and there is a cheaper and more affordable motherboard and chip than what the two I'm thinking of can provide I'd like to know that too. I've been looking all over Tigerdirect.com the last few days, and watching YouTube reviews a lot.
Any help you can provide would be much appreciated.
If you'd like to see my current build, check out my profile.
Personally, I'd stay away from lga 2011 for now. At the moment it only supports the i7 extreme processors, high end i7s and Xeons. If your budget stretches that far, then go for it, by all means. You dont really need to for out much in terms of processor for gaming, so the 3770 will do you fine. That motherboard is also good, but there's a huge choice out there. Just look for one with the feature set you need, find some reviews and choose.
Your 8120 is going to be fine until intel haswell comes out. It'll be a different socket so if you get an ivybridge setup now, you won't be able to upgrade to haswell! If that was your plan.
Appreciate both of your inputs. I'm going to be going for a degree in computer science so I've decided I'll just stick with my current setup for a year or two. It has been working pretty well, minus my gpu driver crashing every day to couple of days. I just took the driver back and hope it works out. Thank you for your inputs. I had no idea about Haswell, and who knows...maybe AMD will do something with 3rd 8 cores.