DPete27 wrote:What Gigabyte mobo do you currently have?
Z77-DS3H. Basic board but gets the job done.
How long do you expect this board to last?
That's an interesting question, I'm actually not sure. I'd have to say "until I need to upgrade" which could be anywhere from 2 to 10 years. I've been rolling my own for nearly two decades but this is the first that I don't anticipate becoming obsolete in a few months.
Will you be overclocking?
No, or at least not significantly. I might bump the CPU up by one notch but nothing beyond that, I'm going for reliability first and foremost.
...power phaes and VRM heatsinks...
Good advice, I'll keep it in mind. Again I'm going for long term reliability over short term OC potential as I don't want to add another relic of the past to my already substantial collection. If the current trajectory of system requirements is any indication there just won't be any reason to for quite a while.
I'll definitely give those some thought, thanks for the compare. I used to run a corporate-series Asus board and I credit it for saving my GPU from a botched aftermarket heatsink install (long and rather unpleasant story) so it wouldn't be hard to get me back on the A-train.
JustAnEngineer wrote:I'm not sure that I see the point in upgrading your existing motherboard if it's working. I especially don't see the point when a new socket will be available in a month and a half.
Valid point, I may well be overthinking it. In the past I've focused on CPU/GPU/HD/RAM in that order and taken the motherboard for granted, since I don't expect to upgrade for a while I want to "do it right" this time around but it's quite possible I already have what I need. I do want to avoid finding out I want more in the near future though because I'll be upgrading to Win7 and it's my understanding you only get 10 activations before needing to make phone calls (if that line even exists when I need it years from now) so I don't want to waste them on stuff I should have anticipated initially.
I'm not too worried about Haswell though aside from it possibly causing a price drop on 1155 components. I run a 2500K now and I like it so aside from possibly dropping in an IB i7 if and when they go on deep discount I anticipate having enough horsepower to get the job done for quite a while. A more likely outcome is that I'd go back to my AMD roots if and when they get competitive again, but that seems a very large if and even I'm not banking on it.