Those aren't bad temps at all. I usually run around 50 on my CPU and 70 on my GPU just using stock fan cooling.

Then again my GPU is old as hell, 8800GTS

I just picked up Starcraft 2 today. It defaults to Ultra settings on everything.

I've been looking at building a similar set-up to this. When I first looked at this I wondered why you spent so much on a motherboard but it sounds pretty cool with the auto unlock and auto overclock buttons. I've read a bit about the phenom II 550 and what I gather is that some of the cores are actually defective and won't work properly when unlocked but usually at least 3 of them are good. It seems there's about a 50/50 chance that all four cores are fine and AMD is just selling them as dual cores because the $$ make sense.

I'm tempted to try it though, a quad core easily oc'd cpu for $90? Seems like a no brainer. If I were to try it I would probably go with a cheaper MB and only one GPU to keep the cost down closer to $700.

Sup.

http://i51.tinypic.com/4hvzb5.jpg
http://i54.tinypic.com/14j8d4h.jpg

Oh my... TT Soprano case... Haven't seen those in a while! Love everything about that case except fans.

One of the reasons my motherboard was so much is that it's based on the 890FX chipset which allows much higher speeds over crossfire. My two 5770's in crossfire will outperform a $400 card and I only spent $300 for the two of them. If you are going single GPU, the 890GX motherboards can be had for an awesome price.

Here's the build I would be following.

http://www.hardware-revolution.com/600-gaming-build/

Rediculous performance for 600 bones. I don't really need a new build RIGHT now though and I wonder what kind of performance I can get for the same price if I wait till December. I am a litte tired of my 6 year old Dell though...

I don't know how future proof the MB in the link is, I would probably want to upgrade to one of the other MBs he recommends, one that I can crossfire in the future when I find some more $ to waste on computers.

Interesting question, and this is for everyone:

Apart from popping in some extra RAM, do people actually "upgrade" PCs anymore, without wholesale replacement of the MoBo?

I mean, I can remember back in the 286/386/486 era, it was not at all uncommon to go through 2 or 3 different CPUs over the life of a motherboard, especially when the fancy Cyrix and TI upgrade processors, which allowed you to install, for instance, clock-doubled 486-class processors into 386-class boards.

Of course, that was when the motherboard cost 5x as much as the video card, and not the other way around.

Seems like nowadays however, motherboards are so damn cheap that they're just not a major factor in the price of the machine anymore. Honestly, I can't remember having kept a motherboard through an upgrade since my first Pentium-class machine.

In my case I would like a motherboard that I can add another GPU in crossfire in the future, this won't make it 5 years future proof but should help me keep up for the next year or two. Having slots to add more RAM never hurts either. For me, when the time comes to upgrade to a new CPU I would probably buy a new MB, like you say it's so cheap, why not?

I hear that both Intel and AMD will be coming out with a new generation of chips in early '11 so maybe I will wait to do a build until then... amn computer technology half-life...

It mostly depends on a chipset that a particular motherboard comes with. If that particular chipset supports newer CPUs - there is no need to upgrade the motherboard. If you are talking about regular Internet-surfing computers then you can go through 2-3 CPUs through lifetime of motherboard before upgrading everything. That usually means 2-3 years.