DiabloFans

The AMD FX-8150 sells for around $240, an Intel i5-3550 sells for $220 and is faster. AMD might be advertising their chip as having 8 cores, but the reality is that it's 4 fully-featured cores with some duplication to make 8. One thing that isn't duplicated is floating-point processing, which shows up in 3D rendering benchmarks like Cinebench: observe the "8-core" 8150 get knocked around by Intel's 4-core i5-2500k (Sandy Bridge) here: http://www.anandtech...duct/434?vs=288 .

I don't consider myself an Intel guy or AMD guy. I buy whatever is best for my money. Back in the Pentium 4 / Athlon64 days, I bought an Athlon 64 because Intel was honestly embarassing at the time. Starting with the Core 2 series, Intel has been superior, and it seems that AMD isn't even competitive today :|

Quote from epiqz

Got all my parts in for the "new" setup. went with the new Ivy Bridge 3.4ghz i5 and an ASRock Z77Pro-4 mobo w/ 8GB of Ram. Sticking with my older 9800GT for now to see how it looks when I get D3 installed. Will look at cards after that if I don't think it performs well enough.

1080p will be a struggle for your 9800GT. Lowering details (shadows especially) might be enough to make it a good experience, but I think a new GPU will be needed if you want to sustain 60 FPS.

Your CPU choice is solid; you won't have to worry bout CPU bottlenecks for years

Quote from Enty

Well there goes trying to get a cheaper build. Guess I'll be sticking with ivy bridge or sandy bridge

A cheaper build kinda went out the window when you started talking about triple-monitors and multi-GPUs

Bulldozer is okay for applications that can saturate all the cores, but isn't competitive otherwise. Sandy Bridge is now outdated, but can be overclocked a bit further than Ivy Bridge. Ivy Bridge is extremely power-efficient, and is definitely the way to go if you're not overclocking much. The characteristics of modern games gives smaller numbers of very fast cores an advantage, so even Intel's "budget" CPUs can outperform Bulldozer on a performance-per-dollar level.

My personal Ivy Bridge + GTX 680 system (just built 5 days ago) idles at only 48 watts, peaks at about 300 watts, and is the quietest system I've ever built thanks to the minimal cooling needs of this low-power gear. Literally two months ago such a system would have been impossible to do.

Quote from Enty

true but i heard the samsung is better quality, is 120Hz and has thinner bezels.

You'll need dual-690s if you want to hit 120 FPS on 3 screens

If you don't mind my asking, what do you do for a living?

The 7750, 7770, and 550 should work without a PSU upgrade, unless your PSU is severly overrating itself. If you're being conservative, of these three, the 7750 uses the least power, and should still be a major upgrade.

Definitely the one with the 6650 graphics processor (the one you linked from Newegg).

I think the $700 Alienware X51 is about the cheapest you could go to get an ejoyable Diablo 3 experience. With very careful part selection you could possibly do it for $500 if you build the system yourself.

Generally speaking, it's very difficult to find a pre-built system in this price range with enough GPU power for 3D games like Diablo 3.

Your 1280x1024 monitor will work with the game, but ideally you'd upgrade to a 16:9 monitor (1920x1080 resolution, for example). If you play at 1280x1024, your view of the game world will have the sides cut off, putting you at a tactical disadvantage; you could use the game's "letterbox" option to crop your view to 1280x720, giving you the full viewing distance, but making everything very small.

The cost of three Dell U2312 puts you very close to one Dell U2711. Just personal opinion, but I enjoy one large screen much more than smaller ones separated by 1-inch-thick bezels. Plus Diablo 3 (like most modern games) is natively 16:9, so multi-monitor setups of any kind have issues.

You don't need to upgrade your GPU for Diablo 3 even on a 2560x1440 monitor like the U2711, but it might help if you insist on the triple-screen approach. For other games, a 7970 or 680 (or two (or a 690)) will be needed if you want to stay close to max details at triple-screen resolutions.

Your Diablo 3 license is attached to your account, not your computer. You can install it on as many computers as you want, even computers you don't own... but your Battle.net account can only be loggged in to one at a time.

Core i7 3770k (Ivy Bridge)
GeForce GTX 680 (EVGA SuperClocked)
2560x1440 27" IPS (Dell U2711)
160 GB SSD (Intel X25-M G2)
16 GB RAM (Samsung 1.35v 30nm)

Case (Silverstone PS-07) and cooling system (Noctua U12P on the CPU, dual Noctua NF-S12B FLX on the case) are optimized for low noise. Power supply (Seasonic SS-560KM 80Plus Gold) operates fanlessly at low load (system idles at 55 watts) and quietly at high load (peak power usage is about 300 watts).

I just finished building it yesterday. It's both the smallest and quietest system I've ever done

Just before the beta ended, I played it on the same computer with both an HDD and an SSD:

• New area loading was about 3x faster with the SSD.
• Asset-loading FPS drops were more harsh with the HDD.
• Performance with a lot of monsters and action was identical.
• As the play session went on and more game resources were cached in memory, the HDD/SSD differential eventually disappeared.

I'm in the process of building a new system, but re-using my SSD. I mirrored the SSD to a hard drive so the old system would remain usable, then pulled the SSD for the new build. This gave me the opportunity to give a fair comparison between the two technologies

Quote from Netherfrost

The reason only the people with very high performance specifications is because the beta requires SO much more than the retail version of the game. You cant judge it from the beta look of it. The retail will lag less, but then agian if youre system is below the recommended, theres not much to do... :-)

I'm guessing you haven't actually played the retail version, since it's only May 2nd right now. Don't assume that things will magically be better. A slow GPU will still be a slow GPU.

Quote from Rbzzz

Thanks, however I was able to switch to the Sabertooth before I read your post and it came out 100 dollars cheaper then my current which allowed me to double my RAM and still come out with a less total, should i still completely avoid Sabertooth? From what I've read on other sites all Z77 motherboards are good and Sabertooth is in line with the rest. I figured I'd save 100 and get a cheaper yet still good motherboard, let me know what you think.

Interesting that using the Sabertooth would save money; it's a very expensive board. Are you sure nothing else changed? The board isn't bad, just ill-concieved, so if the price is right it's still an acceptable choice

Blizzard has documented the Intel HD Graphics series of GPUs as "Low performance": http://us.battle.net...-for-diablo-iii . Unfortunately, unless your laptop is equipped with a discrete GPU that's somehow disabled (in which case, enabling it should help immensely), there's nothing you can do to improve performance with this system.

1. The Sabertooth board looks cool, but the "thermal armor" is completely non-functional. ASUS even provides an extra 40mm fan to blow air through it since it contains the motherboard's own heat. My recommendation is to avoid this one.

2. The main difference between the i7 (3770k) and i5 (3570k) is hyper-threading. It gets you 10-20% more speed for well-threaded applications (think non-realtime video encoders, database systems, 3d rendering). You mentioned twitch.tv, but I'm not sure how much it would benefit from the extra threads. That said, you seem to have an unlimited budget for this thing so I'd get the i7 anyway

3. SSD performance is especailly sensitive to the SATA mode set in the BIOS. They're fastest in "AHCI" mode. Your builder should do this for you, though, and it's the default on most modern motherboards. So there probably isn't anything for you to set up. SSDs give you that cached-in-memory responsiveness at all times, but don't help games all that much since disk access represents a relatively small amount of the time they spend. But they make your computer feel fast, especially compared to one that doesn't have an SSD.

4. 850 watts is overkill. This system will probably draw less than 400 watts fully loaded. Both the Ivy Bridge CPU and GTX 6xx series are extremely power efficient. If you're only getting one video card, I recommend dropping to a lower wattage 80Plus Silver/Gold/Platinum power supply to save electricity and reduce heat output.

5. Thermaltake is a well known brand; I'm confident it will work well for you. Most aftermarket coolers do a great job of taming Intel's chips these days, to be honest. Regarding the HDD, Seagate has been in the industry for decades, and they're either #1 or #2 in global sales right now, so I'm suprised you haven't heard of them.

All the parts you have on your list are top quality, so I'm sure whatever boutique you go to will give you a solid product. I'd still build it myself for half the price, though