Luthier, anyone; which ram is which?

[Flyby]

I intend to do Win7-home-64 bit, and crank my i7-920 only to about 3.6ghz. With DO-stepping, it''ll do 4.0 easy enough, but I'll star somewhere near there. I just need to get the right mobo
What about a good hard drive? Need to do some checking for fast reads and cache. I'll probably get two, plus an external for back-ups. I'll check the older system-builds posted at Tech Report, and Tom's Hardware. But always open to suggestions (that's why I'm here!)
Flyby out.

Originally Posted by Flyby

I intend to do Win7-home-64 bit, and crank my i7-920 only to about 3.6ghz. With DO-stepping, it''ll do 4.0 easy enough, but I'll star somewhere near there. I just need to get the right mobo
What about a good hard drive? Need to do some checking for fast reads and cache. I'll probably get two, plus an external for back-ups. I'll check the older system-builds posted at Tech Report, and Tom's Hardware. But always open to suggestions (that's why I'm here!)
Flyby out.

I have my i7920 CO stepping at 3.5Ghz (21x166) on stock volt and my GTX470 twin frozr 2 is at 800/1600/1800 on 1.040mV. I suggest you to take GTX560 which is around 10% faster than 470 (also cooler and less power hungry) and still enough for COD. Its pretty close to 570 even on stock clocks. No need to spent a money on 570 or even 580 now......4GIGS are must but I recommend 6 for win7 64bit as this OS proved to be best for new quad cores in sims (in ROF on example which is a CPU killer partly because its badly optimised). If you aim to go to 4Ghz (on air) with ur i7 be sure to buy a good CPU cooler (maybe form Scythe).

[Flyby]

and I don't intend to go to 4ghz, unless CoD forces me to! Good tip on 6 gigs of ram for Win7, Tvrdi.
Flyby out

[Blackdog_kt]

Obviously, just because we can push 4Ghz on a D0 stepping i7 920 doesn't mean we should.

I recently saw a very interesting benchmark discussing an often overlooked aspect of overclocking. Most of us will think in terms of pure performance, or performance vs temperature and the need for expensive aftermarket coolers, because that cost might cover the price difference towards the next bigger CPU in the product line, defeating the purpose of overclocking in the first place.

However, not a lot of people think about performance gain vs watts expended. Granted, this is not an issue if you only use your PC at certain times of the day and it also depends on how expensive electricity is where you live, but some people keep their PCs open for days, weeks, or months on end for a variety of reasons.
For example, i have a sibling studying abroad on a post-graduate program and while i do have a combined internet and telephony package at home with free calls to landlines in most of Europe, this doesn't apply to my relative's landline should they need to place call. So, since one of the cheapest and easiest ways for them to communicate is skype, my PC is almost always on to receive incoming video calls.

It might seem like small fries but it's not, in fact some guys in a local hardware forum sat down and measured the average power consumption of a mid range PC. It turns out that if you keep it on 24/7, the way electricity is priced here it translates to an extra 50-70 Euros or more on the bills every couple of months.

In that sense, when overclocking it might be also useful to think about performance vs watts expended because that drives up the bills. On a recent article i saw (excuse me but i don't remember where, as i don't usually spend much time on dedicated hardware websites unless i'm doing some research prior to buying new components), it was deduced through a series of benchmarks under various load conditions that the best compromise is around the 3.6Ghz mark for an i7 920. Higher than that and the extra performance is not enough to justify the cost of the electricity used.

Just something extra to keep in mind in case you might be interested