Good to know on the USB3 front.

I thought the word was that the next generation Ivy-Bridge-E would not be compatible with Current motherboards myself.

I don't see the point in waiting a few moths to find out if the performance gain will be so low!

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Good to know on the USB3 front.

I thought the word was that the next generation Ivy-Bridge-E would not be compatible with Current motherboards myself.

I don't see the point in waiting a few moths to find out if the performance gain will be so low!

The gains form Sandy bridge-E to Ivy Bridge-E are small, but anything you get into will be several steps over your current Athlon X2 hardware.
Comparing Sandy Bridge to Sandy Bridge-E there are not a lot of real world gains. Unless you need the extra memory & i/o bandwidth. Which can be useful if you plan to scale up to 3 or 4 high end GPUs.

While the X79 chipset is compatible with both Sandy Bridge-E & Ivy Bridge-E. I am sure not all board will get a bios update to recognize the Ivy Bridge-E CPU's.

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http://www.anandtech.com/show/7193/intel-ivy-bridgee-pricing-leaked

"Jarred Walton @ Anandtech.com" wrote:

The other item we won’t see (which isn’t in the above table) is new chipsets/motherboards for Ivy Bridge-E. Oh, there will likely be a few new boards, but this isn’t a new platform launch. IVB-E should be a drop-in replacement for SNB-E with a BIOS update, and all of the Tier-1 OEMs are promising support for the new processors.

...

The question most people have with IVB-E is why it even exists in the first place—SNB-E launched after IVB on the consumer side and over a year after SNB showed up, and with Haswell having just come out we’re still a month or more away from IVB-E. Shouldn’t we be looking for Haswell-E instead? The answer is actually a lot less complex than you might suspect, and it goes along with the lack of new motherboards/chipset. LGA-2011 is basically the consumer version of Intel’s Xeon platform; nothing more, nothing less. Oh, you get unlocked CPU multipliers and motherboards targeted more at the enthusiast market (frequently with tons of overclocking options), and you don’t need ECC memory, but LGA-2011 is just a minor tweak to the single-socket Xeon offerings.

Unlike the desktop world where yearly upgrades are common and even encouraged by the manufacturers, Xeon plays in a different market that doesn’t like rapid change. The server cadence from Intel is two generations of support, so each new platform stays around a lot longer. Bringing in Haswell-E would require moving to a new socket, violating the every socket has to stick around for two generations requirement in Xeon-land.

So there you have it. Drop-in replacement for most current Socket 2011 boards provided a BIOS upgrade is available.

Im very happy with my two rigs that run Intel I7 3770 chips. I have a 550Ti in each one.

I run HT, I dont overclock and run 1 wu on the cards and am happy with the rac im getting. Both of these machines beat the heck out of my I7 920.

What ever you decide on your build good luck and have fun doing the research and the building.

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Old James