First Time multiboxer

[Chivalrous]

Oh mirai I need to know more Bout that then, looking forward to that thread. I wish I could SLI and get a performance boost.

[Ualaa]

Your basic upgrade choice is: i7 3770K (4 Core, Ivy Bride) vs i7 3930K (6 Core, Sandy Bridge).
The 3770K is basically half the price, and seems to be very equivalent for most one-boxed (solo) games.

The 3930K has the extra two cores, which helps if you have enough tasks that four (plus four logical cores) is not enough.
It also supports 64GB of ram, twice that of the 3770.
And the ram is quad channel, instead of dual channel.

In general, Intel is reporting that each successive generation of CPU is 10-15% faster (at the same clock speed) as the previous.
The 3770K is 3.5GHz, compared to the 3.2GHz of the 3930K.
So the quad channel ram and extra cores, essentially bring it close to on par with the faster chip.

Intel's roadmap shows the 4770K as the upgrade to the 3770K, and lists early June as the release date.
So basically three months from now, give or take, a better option than a 3770K for likely what a 3770K is going for now.



Once you decide on a processor...
Pick a motherboard that supports that socket type.
If you're going to overclock, a higher end board is a good idea... as is better fans/cooling system etc; if you're going to run at stock speeds, you won't need a top end motherboard.

If your processor uses quad-channel ram, get quad channel ram for it.
If not, then get dual-channel ram.
Four 8GB chips, for a 3930K motherboard is a good start; you can add 4x 8GB more, if you need it down the road.

I went with an EVGA GTX 670 4GB card.
That is probably the best bang for your buck.
The 680 is stronger, but the gains aren't commensurate to the cost increase.

Just about any SSD is going to be a huge improvement over a platter drive.
If you're putting your operating system on the SSD, you'll likely want a higher end one.
If it's a gaming folder (drive), you don't need as top of the line of an SSD.
The Samsung 840s have good reviews, as do the Intel 520s; I like the benchmark on the Corsair Neutrons too, but they're relatively new so its hard to gauge their longer term reliability.

[Khatovar]

How about running then like you one card per monitor, any diff than running both monitors out of a single card?

I ran 1 card per monitor for a while. It worked well enough, except you can't run the second card with DX11, which means my main ran on DX11, but my slaves were forced to DX9. Also, the slaves were pretty unhappy swapping to the main screen/card when they were configured for the secondary card. My last system upgrade, I moved to a single card and it's IMO smoother.

[Chivalrous]

I ran 1 card per monitor for a while. It worked well enough, except you can't run the second card with DX11, which means my main ran on DX11, but my slaves were forced to DX9. Also, the slaves were pretty unhappy swapping to the main screen/card when they were configured for the secondary card. My last system upgrade, I moved to a single card and it's IMO smoother.

I run with a card for each monitor but on my main monitor I have all screens stacked and the other is just DX_Nothing and videoFX. It works--but probably isn't much different than it would be on just a a single card. That's why I wish SLI had worked for me.