Upgrade Advice

[Murdoc]

Greetings

Im in need on some guru advice to finish off my upgrade
So far I have a phenom nom x6 . Im not too sure what board and memory to get
The machine will basically be a design monster, multitasking massive design files , photoshop ,indesign etc and some rendering between

Memory is really important in my experience (my work pc and mac runs out of memory(4gig) with the i7 cores hardly being used on some of the huge artwork files).
Im gona start off with 4gigs and later upgrade to 8. Would 1600 MHz be preferred ? without over clocking, it needs to be really stable.
I have a geforce already , so im not interested in the crossfire thing

So considering the above, What should I get with a budget of R2500-2800? For a Board and 4gig ram. Maybe something trichannel?


I have my eye on this Asus M4A87TD/USB3 AMD870 AM3 Dual-Channel DDR3 PCI-E 2.0. But I have no idea what the difference between the options are , so I’m asking what ya’all think I should do.

Many thanks

 

[Mitchsnitchel]

yo!

I have this same motherboard with 2xPCI-E slots, and its been beautiful. definately a good choice.
for memory : http://www.prophecy.co.za/corsair-cmx4gx3m2a1600c7-xms3-2x2gb-ddr31600-165v-p-63727.html.

If your staying with 1600Hz memory then I suggest maybe 8 gigs? Have some friends in 3D modelling and texturing and with 8 Gigs RAM their has never been problems for them.
You could also move over to faster memory, namely 1866Hz or 2000Hz, in that case only 4 Gigs necessary. Unsure though

 

[Mitchsnitchel]

go for faster RAM, to keep up with that beast CPU

 

[Archer]

Faster RAM is near useless. Its mostly marketing hype and only really shows large performance games in benchmarks. Get proper DDR3 RAM with tight timings (eg 8-8-8-24 and runs at 1.5V (1.65V max). Something like this. The Corsair ram lised above is excellent, though pricey. Wont be able to fit a proper board in there. My advice is in this case is to spend about R1500 - 1600 on the board, and rest on RAM. The 790/890GX motherboards will work great for you, just pick the manufacturer you feel most comfortable with. The 800 series has some newer features that you may benefit from in the long term (USB/SATA 3)

 

[Chevron]

I agree with archer. Still with 1333mhz ram but get more of it. Faster ram useless.

 

[nakedpeanut]

I'm running a set of those g.skills.. Very easy to get their pronounced timings .. I agree you'd be better off with more ram at better timings than higher MHz..
Since you've already bought the CPU, It is kind of late for me to tell you that the i7's have more memory bandwidth than AMD, and I'm sure you'd notice that when working with your files..

(my work pc and mac runs out of memory(4gig) with the i7 cores hardly being used on some of the huge artwork files).

If what you saying is true why are you going more cores?