That's a mighty nice card you're getting, but the AMD won't let it stretch it's legs and run (for whatever reason, in WoW). It's not my opinion, it's right there in non-biased, objective research.
How about no? I don't know what you've been researching, but a 955 is very easily powerful enough to make use of a 6870. The only cards I've ever seen the Phenom II become a bottleneck on is the Radeon HD5970, which is actually two graphics cards in one, and is still the fastest card on the market...even ahead of the GTX 580.
And even then, it had to be run at some damned crazy settings for that to happen. For the most part,
in gaming, there will be relatively little difference between an i7 and a Phenom II quad, given the same graphics card.
I don't care about brands or names, I read reviews. The mobo I listed has 5/5 customer review. If people worried about brand names so much, Hyundai would still be selling $5,000 throw-away cars.
Newegg reviews are worthless, dude. That board has a wimpy VRM's, very few features, and has Biostar's crappy customer support and software. Fun fact; It was Biostar's crappy BIOS coding that led to people being able to unlock cores on AMD cpu's. Nobody figured that out on purpose...Biostar just had software that didn't work right.
Granted, there
are worse boards than that one, but it really is not very good. Definitely not up to the standards that Gigabyte and Asus keep.
Personally, I had to ask myself, "Should I spend $1,000 and get a great computer, or spend $1,100 and get 70-80% better performance than the $1,000 build?"
Bullshit. You're talking out of your arse, buddy. There will be performance gains with an i5
quad, but not ANYWHERE near 70%. It'd be something like 10% in raw processing power, at most,
IF that was a quad core i5, which it isn't. The gap is even narrower in most games. As-is, the Phenom II 955 is easily the more powerful processor, even if the 655 is better in single and dual threaded games. (read: old games)
Further, the socket 1156 platform that the i5 is on will be completely replaced on Jan. 5, by socket 1155. The two are not compatible in any way. On the AMD side, AM3 is also being replaced, by AM3+, but not for several months. The difference in the two is that is that the old AMD processors will work in the new motherboards, making the upgrade process much smoother.
So, by going with an i5 650, you'd be paying 25% more for a weaker processor and somewhat similar performance in gaming, as long as those games are older ones that only support two cores. By going with an i5 750/760, you'd be paying roughly 35% more for a 5-10% increase in performance. And either way, you're still buying parts that will be completely replaced two days form now.
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