nice build. Detailed bios info is pretty scant. you probably can get a general overview from an online mb review of your model or any in the P8Z77 series because they're all pretty similar bios wise but about as in-depth as the manual. info for Individual bios setting other than the self explanatory are a hunt and peck affair on overclocking forums where squeezing the last MHz is the goal. start familiarizing yourself by updating the bios now, it's in the manual. every asus mb i've used shipped with the initial release, usually several versions old. generally you can jump from the oldest to the newest bios but with windows 8 you'll need to read the release discription of each successive version in case of special instructions. before you fuck up go to the asus.store.com and see if you can buy a bios chip.
far cry 3 was pretty good. so far-i'm on top of all those rakyat challenges.almost done it on my son's PC,while he was on break a bit disappointed,that it was dx9 for PC,but overall-pretty pretty good.
Just did the easy overclock that the Asus software does, ramped the chip up to 4.2 from 3.5, and Prime95 is stable and takes the temperatures up to a max 69c. From what I have read so far taking this chip to 4.5 to 4.7 seems to be the max. It apparently doesn't overclock as well as sandy bridge. Seems to be a lot of varied opinions on overclocking, it appears a lot of people do it just to do it. I am not sure how much it helps. I have run some of my long Excel calcs and I can definitely measure time differences in the different speeds of the chip, but is it worth it? I don't know yet.
I have been an overclocker pretty-much all my life (actually, from my Pentium-II 233MHz), mostly for perf./cost reasons. Last 2 OC systems were Q6600@3Ghz (1 used for R&D, the other used to be live trading). Those 2 systems are 5 year old, and still work like a charm (despite using the retail heatsink) - just couldn't get the amount of RAM I needed on them. My latest build, for R&D, is a i7-3930K w/ 64GB RAM ... built-it to my needs, primarily to meet Ninja's memory requirements during optimizations, and have those optimizations as fast as possible, using all 12 cores (6 x2 w/ hyper-threading). Found that system on stock settings almost twice as fast as the Q6600@3Ghz for SuperPi (single-threaded) ... I have already had optimization runs going for 48h (and chewing over 40GB ram) ... decided OC would not bring me much improvement vs what I already have, and I want to extend this chip's life as long as possible ... so I left it at stock settings for the time being.
yeah.. you gaining speed,but losing stability(and that's what we really need in trading). my primary reason to keep the PC as simple as possible. it's basically an empty box.cheap NVS card,good PSU,MB+ CPU and that's about it. build,test-if everything works-close it and forget. screw all updates..i have enough troubles with IB's TWS alone.
I have just spent a considerable amount of time overclocking my new machine. I can't believe how much time it took, but it was very interesting. Building the machine doesn't take much time at all, but finding a safe and stable long term overclock takes a lot longer than you would think. On the upside you get a 20 to 25% faster machine.