I got this message through my NCIXcom YouTube channel where I post NCIX Tech Tips videos.

ive started putting together my first rig and so far ive only gotten the case and the psu (cosmos-s, real power modular 850w) now for the next step i need your wisdom and advice… i was thinking about something along the lines of:
EVGA x-58 3-SLi
PNY 9800 GT XLR8 OC SVGA ( X2 )
INTEL CORE I7-920
6 Gb of corsair dominator Ram

what afvise do you have and will this support three 22″screens comfortably??

The only real changes that I would recommend making to this configuration are the video cards and the 6GB of Dominator RAM.

If you want to play modern games on 1680×1050 monitors (running on all three monitors), then you’ll need one more powerful graphics card to go with a 9800GT. Something like a GTX 280 would be a good fit with the recent price drops. That way you can run the more powerful card with two monitors and the less powerful card with only one. Another configuration option here would be to run 3 9800GTs so all three screens will be equally powered.

If you don’t need top performance in 3D applications on all three screens, then a 9800GT is overkill for your extra monitors. You’d be better off spending your money on one good GPU and then a super cheap one. Something to be aware of is that running multi-monitor in SLI (in 2D… 3D is still limited to only one monitor) is limited to 2 monitors. You can only plug in one additional monitor to the same video card as your SLI focus display.

For the RAM, I would just recommend going with regular XMS3 unless you’re planning on some serious overclocking. Core i7 is not very sensitive to higher memory bandwidth (or lower latencies), so inexpensive memory may save you a few dollars to spend on higher end GPUs.

Phenom II is a lot of things. Performance leader is not one of them. What it is though, is a return to value and competition with Intel’s mid-range at stock, and competition with Intel’s high end when overclocked.

The Phenom II really reminds me of the Barton core. It’s not the fastest, but it’s fast enough at the right price. I did some quick & dirty benchmarks of the Phenom II 940 Black against Intel’s latest and greatest Intel Core i7 just to get a point of reference for cost to performance. Forgive my fail Excel graphs…

So basically with a little bit of overclocking, enthusiasts can get about 90% of the performance of a Core i7 Extreme 965 for a fraction of the cost. Sure you can do it on the Intel side too, but at least AMD is an option again.

Throughout the day I get quite a few emails asking me various tech & computer related questions, so I thought, “What better place to answer them than my blog?”

Q: What i have to do to overclock core i7 965 and what type of cooling to use and what memory, which motherboard and a good videocard.

A: Overclocking the Core i7 as I covered somewhat in my video here, is not all that complicated provided you have the right system components, but what I didn’t really cover is a list of recommended components.

I’ll start with cooling and work my way through the rest of your questions. When we did up that video, the CPU had just launched and there wasn’t a whole lot available! In fact, we only had ONE CPU cooler in stock that was even compatible with the Core i7! Now the situation looks a lot better and there are lots of different options.

Water cooling recommendation: The Swiftech APOGEE GTZ gets my vote. Don’t forget a hold down!
Air cooling recommendation: The Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme still rocks and comes in 1366 now.

For memory, once you get into about 1333MHz triple channel, the performance doesn’t improve much. The most important thing to consider when selecting memory (in my opinion) is the after-sales support. Almost every RAM vendor it seems offfers a “lifetime” warranty, but very few of them are actually likely to be around long enough for that to matter. At this point I can’t recommend buying 3GB of memory. It’s time to move on to 64-bit and lots of RAM!

6GB RAM Recommendation: Corsair 1333MHz C9

For motherboard there are lots of different options out there already, but my high end recommendation is still the Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME. It has a great feature set, the BIOS is maturing very fast (I use this board in my own system), and the overclocking is very good, even with 12GB of memory.

If you want to save a few bucks, the recently-launched ASUS P6T looks like a tremendous value offering (if you can call a $300 board a “value offering”…)

As for the video card, that doesn’t affect overclocking, but now that so many of the X58 boards support SLI AND Crossfire, you’re free to use pretty much whatever video card you want! Just pick the one that best suits your budget and performance requirements.

Well I had a chance to finally see one of these rare beasts in person. These boards were rare as hen’s teeth on launch, and the situation is finally starting to look a little bit better, at least in Canada.

There’s a lot of buzz around this board both because it’s eVGA’s first non-nVidia motherboard, and because some of the early overclocking results with it looked VERY impressive. We go over the included accessories and features with an emphasis on what eVGA’s engineering team has done to make this board great for PC enthusiasts.

Well the new NCIX Tech Tips is here. We didn’t have any samples to work with until only a few days before the retail launch, so we’ve spent a lot of time playing with these chips, researching online, and putting together this overclocking guide for the Core i7.

It’s not as in-depth as I would necessarily like, but at 8 minutes long it’s already a bit of a heavyweight. The white board I had in front of me looked like some of my calculus lectures!

HAI GUISE,

ALMOST FINISH I7 UPGRADE LULZ XD I CAN USE MY OLD CPU FOR GAMEING?

SEEMS WONT FIT SO I HELPED TO UPDATE THE BOTTOM HALF

I WILL HAVE CPU BOTTLENECK NOW?!?!?!