Village wrote:If "IF" I execute on a build soon I think it will be down the R7 line. Besides gaming, I'm also operating VM's and serving media at the same time. Not that an R5 wouldn't be a significant boost over my current i7-930. But I think I benefit from triple channel when doing multiple things. Mind you, I have no empirical evidence to support this. Just vague more concurrently available bandwidth is better. And for that reason, I will wait a while and see if quad channel solutions show up.
Village, once you go that route (which is what I did), I ended up hosting my "NAS" as a local RAID array on my main PC. Saved me the price of maintaining a separate CPU/case and my personal performance is no longer network-limited (although everyone else doesn't get that benefit).
I considered running a FreeNAS instance as a VM, but, again, why run all that data through my network card? May as well just share my array from the Host OS. The NZXT H440 case is insane - every single drive tray (and there are 10) has a 3.5" mount point on top and a 2.5" mount point on the bottom, for 20 drives total (there's an extra 3.5" spot near the motherboard tray as well).