PC Upgrade Help AMD vs Intel

[FMod]

It is not crazy not to overclock.

It is, however, slightly crazy to increase the uGridsToLoad setting in Skyrim.

And it is definitely crazy to expect to get smooth gameplay with it without squeezing every last bit out of your PC.

 

These things go hand in hand. If you want to "pimp out" your game, you need to make the hardware match it.

 

Xeons use the same exact chips. Intel basically makes the same chip for i5, i7 and SP Xeons, then turns off blocks and features to fit the price. Semiconductor industry requires massive scales; they don't have the capability to make a specific CPU model any different from another that uses the same die.

 

While overclocking may affect component lifetime, the approximate order of failure for components is as follows:

* Power supplies

* Video cards (high-end only)

* Hard drives

* Motherboards

... Everything else ...

* CPU

* RAM

* Cases (well, you can drop it off a truck or something)

 

In short, CPU failure rate is extremely low and for all practical purposes CPU and RAM are considered almost infallible. Plenty of people have been running SB chips at 1.45V, and, 2 years in, even those hardcore OC'd CPU are doing fine. You'd be looking at about 1.28V for 4.2 GHz clock, pretty much the stock voltage. The CPU should last for 10+ years. I doubt much else in your PC will.

 

There is not any measurably more risk to Turbo only overclocking than there is to having a computer at all, as long as you buy acceptable quality components. There is also a reason Intel sells unlocked "K" chips and a reason they comprise the higher end of their offerings.

 

Some tablets can run Skyrim already; but only just, not pimped out with heavy mods. This won't change much. It's very likely that there will never be an x86 tablet CPU that matches current desktop CPU in single-threaded performance. Multi-threaded or RISC performance doesn't matter because Skyrim requires x86 and is bottlenecked by a single thread.

[Jupitus]

I am going through this currently myself after tiring of watching my old mobo and processor bottlenecking my gtx580. I found Pick Your Processor to be informative. For gaming the (LGA1155)s are all you should ever need, the 3770K and the 3570K would be better choices than the 3820 (LGA2011) or any AMD in your situation in my opinion. The consensus in these forums appears to be that the 3570K is the best bang for the buck gaming cpu of those listed and 8GB ram is all that you need. I ended up going with the i7 3770K OCd to 4.5Ghz, an ASUS Z77 Chipset mobo, and 16GB ram to drive a gtx680 4GB which is a bit overkill but I do more than games and I like yourself am wishing to futureproof to a reasonable extent. One thing that I would add is that choosing a SLI capable mobo would give you another option GPU wise in the future.