You probably won’t see any framerate difference

Posted by Rousutt Rousutt over 6 months ago

My high-end recommendation is designed around using one very powerful graphics card, with the potential of upgrading to a two-GPU SLI setup if you want the extra power. That just leaves one question: are you sacrificing performance by having two cards run at only x8 instead of x16? The answer is: no, not really. If you need convincing, check out Linus Tech Tips’ great video on PCIe lanes.Haswell-E CPUs and the X99 motherboards and DDR4 RAM that go along with them are simply more expensive than they’re worth for a single- or double-GPU system. That’s why, for our money, the Core i7-4790K is the best choice for a high-end CPU.Motherboard: Asus Maximus VII HeroPrice: $210 on AmazonLike a high-end CPU, a high-end motherboard could easily cost hundreds of dollars. The most expensive motherboards tend to pile on features that I don’t think are very important, even in a high-end gaming rig. That’s why at $210, I think the Asus Maximus VII http://www.ffxivmall.com Hero is the right balance of features, performance, and price.Overclockers3D’s review of the motherboard praises its overclocking performance (4.9GHz!) and RAM overclocking as well. In February 2015, HardOCP wrote “The ASUS Maximus VII Hero is nothing short of the best LGA 1150 motherboard we have had the pleasure of reviewing to date” and states that Asus has the best UEFI BIOS in the business.In terms of features, the Maximus VII has two x16 PCIe 3.0 slots and an additional PCIe 2.0 slot, plus three PCIe x1 slots; six SATA 6GB/s ports and an M.2 PCIe slot; and six USB 3.0 ports. It supports RAM up to 3200MHz and has some convenient on-board buttons: power, reset, CMOS clear, and memOK. And it’s a standard ATX board, so it should fit in the vast majority of PC cases.Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X 2133 MHz DDR3 (16GB)Price: $150 on NeweggG.Skill is likely the best-known name in RAM for gaming rigs behind Corsair. They’re consistently promoting their fastest RAM, which brings up the question: how important is RAM speed? How much speed are you getting for your money? How much money should you be spending to get speed versus quantity?According to my research into RAM speed (here’s a great article on Anandtech), faster speeds and memory timings aren’t that important, especially for gaming. You’re not going to see much of a framerate difference as a result of RAM speeds. In fact, you probably won’t see any framerate difference at all. RAM speed makes more of a difference in other PC tasks, but Anandtech’s bottom-line advice is pretty simple: more RAM is a better upgrade than faster RAM, and RAM faster than 1600 MHz makes a small but meaningful difference.For our medium build, I recommended 1866 MHz RAM, but for a high-end rig like this one, I think the extra speed (and faster memory timings) of 2133 MHz RAM is worth the upgrade.