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Originally Posted by damien c

A single 780 6gb card will not give 60fps at anything more than Low quality settings, my 2 780Ti's will only give on average 45fps in most games maxed out and when you drop, the quality then you start to push to 60fps and that is with 2 cards that are more powerful than a 780, that is also with a 4930k which does perform slightly better than a 4670k in games and 16Gb 2400Mhz ram which was in the test machine.

Bollocks. A few things first. You seem to be under the impression the only games anyone ever plays are the most recent and most demanding games at maximum settings. Perhaps you feel turning anything down from "Ultra" is a mortal sin. Believe it or not, it's only the most hardcore gamers and overclockers that care whether their game is running at Ultra all the time or merely "Very high".

You also seem to feel that having ridiculously high memory clocks is actually a good thing, but that's another issue...

Notwithstanding the fact that scaling in SLI is pretty crap in many games right now, if you are only getting 45fps in "most games" with dual 780ti's then you are doing something seriously wrong. As you can see here a single 3GB 780 GTX can do an average of 37fps in Battlefield 4, 38fps in Bioshock, 22fps in Crysis 3, 69fps in Skyrim, all on ultra or max settings. Here you can see Dirt Showdown doing 59.4fps average at 4K on ultra, but more demanding games can fall apart. As you see here most of the games they benchmarked do 37fps+ on maximum settings with a single 780 GTX card, and with two in SLI all but one game averaged over 50fps, many doing 60-70fps at 4K ultra. So again, either your setup is broken, or your idea of "most games" is.

Course you mustn't forget review sites deliberately benchmark using the latest and most demanding games in order to stress the cards, not to give a balanced cross-section of most games that are played. Consequently, with a single card that can be had for £355 doing 30-40fps in the most demanding games at 4K ultra settings, less demanding games such as Call of Duty, WoW, KSP, CS:GO, Civ 5, TF2, or even (shock horror) Age of Empires will happily run at double or triple that set to maximum everything. Hell Team Fortress 2 gets 250fps and CS:GO 160fps on 4K, FTL gets 2500fps.

If you were to look beyond "OMG CRYSIS BATTLEFIELD CALL OF DUTY" and look at a more balanced cross-section of games here, at a more sensible mainstream resolution of 2560x1600 we see a single GTX 780 card managing to average, again on ultra/maximum settings:

123fps in Lost Planet 2
109fps in Just Cause 2
166fps in F1 2012
53fps in Metro Last Light
83fps in Dirt Showdown
32fps in Nexuiz
105fps in Sniper Elite v2
129fps in Sleeping Dogs
79fps in Hitman Absolution
58fps in Tomb Raider
74fps in Bioshock Infinite
100fps in Battlefield 4

All of which are still fairly modern, though not bleeding edge games. So with 6 out of 12 games in that selection managing 100fps+, and knowing that typically going from 2560x whatever to 4K yields a 30-50% drop in performance, then we can deduce half those games can happily run at 60fps on maximum settings at 4K. And those aren't particularly old games.

I keep thinking to myself about getting a 4K monitor but I still get put of by the fact, that my £2500 pc will not run most games at 4K with 60fps minimum without turning, the details all the way down to medium or low.

Again, bollocks. See above. A single £355 card in a £1000 PC (excl. monitor) will happily produce playable framerates in many games at maximum settings at 4K, assuming your idea of "most games" isn't comprised solely of Crysis 3 benchmarks. Indeed, if you look down the list of best selling PC games on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...video_games#PC
Every single one of them will run at max at 4k and produce 60fps+

Going by Raptr's list at least 8 out of the top 10 games will run 60fps+ at 4K on maximum settings.

So again, either you are doing something seriously wrong, or your rather deluded perception of "most games" actually means "the most demanding latest generation games that benchmark sites choose to stress GPUs to the maximum"

To play games at 4K I would need to go and buy 3 Nvidia Titan Blacks, and then I would only get about 55fps maxed out at 4K, and if I dropped the details down or turned of AA I would get more than 60fps.

Again, bollocks. See above.

Have a look here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPwtDta32wI

Oh look, its Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 and Bioshock Infinite again. Wait, what did I just say?

I'm not even going to bother wasting my time with the rest.

I have had in the past, 2 Gigabyte X58 boards that both died within 16 months from overclocking

Good for you - we've already proven above that you're doing it wrong or just deluded, but my Gigabyte X58 board which is still flawless having run a 2.66Ghz i7 overclocked to 4Ghz for the past five years

13 Asus boards including Rampage II Extreme, Rampage III Extreme (6 boards in the space of 7 days), Rampage III Extreme Black Edition, Asus P8-P67 Pro (2), Asus P8-Z77-V Pro which is still working techincally but needs add in cards and finally a Asus Rampage IV Extreme on day 2 and now the Rampage IV Extreme that is currently on my test bench, which has sata issues, network issues and also PCI-E issues, and this board is not dieing due to heat as it's watercooled and cooled by a 1080 rad.

Good for you. In other anecdotal news, my housemate has managed to fry 5 Asus boards, several sound cards, an SSD and two CPUs with a dodgy power supply. Clearly, Asus boards are crap if they've stopped working! They must be extra crap because it's the Asus board's fault the sound card plugged into it was also fried!
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As is becoming a common theme here, if you are breaking 6 motherboards in the space of 7 days you are doing something seriously wrong.

And for anyone else reading, I personally wouldn't trust my PC building decisions to a guy who manages to break more hardware than an entire IT department worth of geeks and gamers combined.

So my Experience with Gigabyte and Asus has put me off them and I don't recommend them to anyone, where as my MSI P67 motherboard is working perfectly fine with no issues at all.

And in my experience with Gigabyte boards they're great, and I would recommend them, same with Asus if you can tolerate their horrendous website. Personally, all my MSI boards have experienced bugs that cause random data corruption on the hard drive so I wouldn't recommend them to anybody.

Also Xeon boards are designed for being pushed at high temps and constant workloads as they are "Server" and "Enterprise" boards, try doing that with a normal "Consumer" board and see how long it lasts.

Err, I was talking about consumer boards... Since when did server/workstation boards have overclocking features? Grasping at straws much?.

As above, it is exactly these Gigabyte EX58 consumer boards that are in high demand because of their reputation for excellent reliability, and even 5 year old boards are wanted because second hand Xeons are cheap, and the boards are great overclockers.

The SSD size of 512Gb is because of the developers being lazy, Titanfall looks like a game from 5 years ago but requires 52.8Gb of storage space with the first DLC thank's to, 35Gb of Audio Data that should be compressed and decompressed on the fly but is instead uncompressed on install, and doesn't sound much better than if it was compressed.

Well I'm sorry your audio system is crap, but leaving it compressed would have been lazier due to extra CPU cycles and latency incurred from trying to decompress 30 streams of audio in real time. They've found a solution that lets you have excellent quality audio without lagging the game to crap. That makes them lazy.

Call of duty[blah] Battlefield 4 [blah blah] Crysis 3 [blah blah] Metro Last Light[blah]

What did I say about "most games" again? It's becoming very clear your idea of "most games" [that only run at 45fps] does in fact, comprise primarily of spewing out meaningless benchmarks of headliner mainstream titles and not actually... enjoying a game.

Those games would take 160Gb on a SSD and then you have windows on top which can range from 4Gb to iirc 25Gb, then you have apps on top and potentially other games that will be installed along the way whilst keeping those other games installed, just makes sense to pay £150 for a 512Gb SSD instead of £110 for a 256Gb.

Which is why I said use an SSD cache. Only the parts of the game that are accessed frequently are stored on the SSD and all the "junk" which you clearly don't use will be dunked on the hard drive. A 40GB game would hence take 20-30GB of SSD space, leaving over 100GB free. Unless you intend to play 5 of those games simultaneously - but then you'd be getting 11fps and have to turn the settings all the way down to "normal games" mode...

Also sure, you can get a 512GB SSD for £150 on a short-term temporary offer for a particularly rubbish SSD with the lowest lifetime and endurance of any SSD built to date yet, but hey, you seem to enjoy breaking your equipment repeatedly.

Also developers are making games on the pc require more Vram than they should, because the new consoles have "Unified Memory" and that is why the likes of Call Of Duty Ghost's and Titanfall both use 3Gb+ whilst delivering graphics that look like they should only need 1Gb of Vram.

The only thing lazy is doing a console port in the first place. Yes, some crap developers are lazy. However many developers are making games for the PC that have been developed from the ground up to be fully optimized purely for PC and look and run great. But as above, since your idea of "most games" is quite literally "Battlefield, COD, Titanfall, Crysis" as you keep repeating, pretty much all of which are console ports, you probably won't have come across any properly developed games.

As for the cooler, the Devils Canyon cpu's run hot but not as hot as the Ivy Bridge and Haswell cpu's, and given that the OP is looking to overclock then it would do there cpu a world of good to have a decent cooler on it, and with a H100i with Noctua fans on it, it will perform better than any sealed watercooler on the market and any air cooler on the market that is designed for a cpu for "Amatuer" overclockers.

By "hot" you mean 60'c at full load using a tiny, slimline stock cooler?

Yeah, totally hot.

You can get exactly the same cooling performance as the H100i on normal settings with a £20 air cooler.

So yeah, now I've proven a single GTX 780 can happily play many games at 60fps at 4K (which was merely an example of how much money some people like to waste) and almost everything on max at more sensible resolutions of 1440p or 1080p, do you have anything meaninful to discredit the card that doesn't revolve around "zomfg *cry* it doesn't play Crysis on ultra!!!111oneoneone".