How much future-proof/feature-rich we(you) can make?

[Deleted member 13524]

I mean as a platform. Yes, you have new products for the platform but as a future-proof platform it is old wrt. USB 3, SATA 6, etc.

X79 launched with SandyBridge-E. It is fairly old and lacking in USB 3 and SATA 6Gbps ports. Also not worth the extra expense vs a LGA1150 board and CPU.

It'll be very hard to find a single X79 motherboard in the market today without USB 3.0 and SATA6.
2*SATA6 connections are native to the X79 actually, and pretty much all X79 motherboards have extra SATA6 and USB3 connections through dedicated controller ICs These ICs connect to the system through PCI-Express, so performance is pretty much the same (even better in some cases) and the platform has more than enough PCI-Express lanes to spare.



@Vermalas, the biggest advantage of having an enormous amount of RAM (64GB) would be to create a virtual storage drive (meaning: allocating part of the RAM to create a storage disk).
Imagine having i.e. a virtual disk working at a peak of 50GB/s instead of the ~500MB limit you'll find in a SSD. That's 100 times faster and it wouldn't cause any degradation over time.

64GB RAM and using half or 2/3rds of it to make a drive as work buffer could be a better investment than the extra two cores from the 4930K and you could even buy one SSD less.

 

[homerdog]

I think since he isn't very familiar with building computers he should keep things simple. He could always try a RAMdisk later if he feels the SSD isn't fast enough.

 

[Blazkowicz]

It'll be very hard to find a single X79 motherboard in the market today without USB 3.0 and SATA6.
2*SATA6 connections are native to the X79 actually, and pretty much all X79 motherboards have extra SATA6 and USB3 connections through dedicated controller ICs These ICs connect to the system through PCI-Express, so performance is pretty much the same (even better in some cases) and the platform has more than enough PCI-Express lanes to spare.

In fact if you're worried about I/O there's room for e.g. a network card with two 10-gig ethernet ports, an additional controller card with 8 SAS/SATA 6Gb, a PCIe 1x USB3 controller card and you still get to use a big GPU with full PCIe bandwith.