The P9X79 Deluxe gives you just about everything an enthusiast would truly want: tri-SLI, CrossFire X, PCIe 3.0, tons of overclocking features, lots of USB 3.0 ports, and truly fast performance compared to the other X79 boards we've seen. Now if only it had more SATA 6Gb/s ports and the price wasn’t so painful.
Intel’s chipsets have felt incremental lately and the Z77 chipset doesn’t change that. Still, if we were to hunting for an LGA1155 board today, we’d want a Z77 over Z68 since we know it’ll work with Ivy Bridge CPUs and we finally get native USB 3.0. For bang for the buck boards, we think Asus P8Z77-V is our favorite today. You get Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, SLI and Crossfire plus the best USB 3.0 performance we’ve seen under Windows 7 thus far.
This is a genuine AM3+ board, so it will work with a host of AMD's latest and greatest processors, including everything in the new FX lineup. AMD's new 990X chipset supports all the latest features, including front-panel USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s, but it will also allow you to run multiple videocards in your choice of CrossFire or SLI. It's a solid mid-range board that crosses all the t's and dots all the i's.
Intel's Core i7-3960X is like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of goodness, combining the two great tastes of Sandy Bridge and Gulftown. It's the fastest CPU that's ever blown through our benchmarks. That's not to mention the insane amounts of memory bandwidth and tons of PCIe 3.0 lanes it supports. To use another food metaphor, the Core i7-3960X is prime rib topped with a New York strip steak, followed by a Kobe beef chaser.
We were on the fence when picking between Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge for our mid-range pick. Now that we have Intel’s new 22nm Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K, we think it wins. It's faster clock-for-clock than SB-E. We still think the Sandy Bridge-E Core i7-3820 is a good choice for those who intend to upgrade to hexa-core or like to live on a motherboard for generations.
Think of the Core i5-3570K as the Core i5-2500K, but faster and newer. The Core i5-3570K has the same relationship with the stellar Core i7-3770K as the i5-2500K does to the i7-2600K: it’s basically the same but it lacks Hyper-Threading and in this case, it has a little less cache. But when you can pick this baby up for $229, it’s hard to argue with this kind of performance.
"Price-No-Object" is pretty unambigous. If you have unlimited dollars to buy a single consumer graphics card, might as well buy the best: a $1,000 dual-GPU monster. The GTX 690 contains two full GK104 GPUs (the same ones from the GTX 680) and is very nearly as fast as dual 680s in SLI, but it takes up less space and draws less power. Also, it's pretty.
It the video card that the AMD Radeon HD 7970 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 can't catch up to, no matter how hard you overclock them. It sports 6GB of RAM and it's based on hardware used in supercomputers around the world. Ladies and gents, the GeForce GTX Titan.
You might expect a GeForce GTX 680 here, but MSI's "Power Edition" can stay within a few percentage points for about $100 less. AMD's Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is another option, but we haven't gotten one in for review yet.
The GeForce GTX 660Ti is how a video card should be made - it's affordable, has fantastic cooling, runs quietly, and is just slightly overclocked. At the time of this review the Gigabyte was the same price as the reference boards, making its killer cooling and boosted performance like those mints you find under your pillow at a hotel.
