£650 to spend - Little advice?

[shaithis]

The question is...are you really going to be hammering the system with VMs so hard that the extra 5-10% performance you get from HT will actually be noticeable?

I doubt it very much....I run a ton of VMs on a regular basis and have HT disabled on my i7.....

[Rylan]

Essentially thats where we're at now. It's not about SSD or case any more.

It simply comes down to i5 + 570 or i7 + 560ti.

From all accounts the variation between i5 and i7 is neglible for what I'll need. However, from all other accounts the difference between a 560ti and a 570 is just as negligble.

[Rylan]

Incidentally, why have you decided to disable the HT?

[shaithis]

HT can play havoc with some titles. BF3 is one of them, another (that I was recently playing) was resident evil 5.

Considering you only get the advantage of HT when you have a lot of concurrent small threads AND the CPU is maxed-out, it's advantages are seen once in a blue moon...to the point where I decided a while ago, that it was being turned off.

If you game, you are going to see infinitely more use from a gfx card upgrade then HT.

[Rylan]

Okay.

Thanks! It's just time to spend the cash now.

[Pob255]

one thing Illl mention is are you looking to overclock? if so then I'd spend more on the motherboard, the cheap Z68 motherboards have fairly weak VRM's which will not bode well for long term overclocking, they should be fine for running at stock but the sandybridge cpu's start pulling a lot more power when you overclock them.

For overclocking you want to be looking at something like the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4 or Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3P-B3 or Asus P8Z68-V or even the ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3