Intel's new high end "enthusiast" platform, X99, arrives tomorrow. Summing up:

* New socket, LGA 2011-3, with new Haswell-E processors (more on that shortly)

* DDR4 memory

* Lots of PCI express lanes

* 8 DIMM slots on ATX form factor boards, 4 on mATX

* No USB 3.1 integrated into the controller (could be added by motherboards)

* Probably going to see M.2 and SATA Express, if anyone cares (does anyone care?)

There are three rumored CPUs: http://www.pcper.com/news/Processors/Rumor-New-Intel-Core-i7-Haswell-E-Processor-Specs-Allegedly-Leaked

This is the first time the Core range is moving beyond 4 physical cores, I believe. The two lower end chips are 6 core unlocked parts, and the rather expensive Extreme series chip is an 8 core monster.

There are also rumors that NVIDIA's next gen 880 GTX will make an appearance rather soon: http://videocardz.com/51117/exclusive-nvidia-geforce-gtx-880-released-september

All this means... it's time to plot a new high end build for a multi-year Serious Business(tm) workstation! My thinking is along these lines:

* Core i7-5930K (6 core, 3.5 GHz)

* 32 GB of DDR4 in 4x8, expandable later to 64

* Motherboard... will depend on what's available tomorrow, I guess. ASUS or MSI are probably top choices?

* Samsung 850 Pro main drive

* Big ass striped RAID of WD Blacks for my video work, some of which is 4K

* Make do with my 7970 until the 880 arrives

* Healthy power supply, 1000-1200 W perhaps. Any favorite brands? I'm leaning Corsair.

* Closed loop cooler, most likely Corsair H100i. I love those things.

* Cases... the Corsair C70 was great when I built another machine. Might just go back to that.

Anyone else planning a high end build around the new platform? Or in general I'd love to hear what kind of parts you'd tend to put in when building a desktop machine in the 3-4K range.

I just put a used gtx 650 ti boost in my system yesterday, so nothing too high end here anytime soon.

I will definitely go for the 850 series SSDs sometime next year though.

I would love the DDR4 and the 8 core processor, but I won't be making a new build any time soon. I built my current dev machine in 2010:

Asus Rampage III Formula board

i7 980x (6 core, hyperthreaded, 3.4 Ghz)

24 GB G-Skill DDR3 1600, tripple channel

Dual 160 GB Intel SSDs in RAID 0

HD 5870 Eyefinity

I recently upgraded my monitors to 3x Samsung U590D's (28", 4k), so I also gave away my 5870 and replaced it with two R9 280x's.

I usually buy right around the knee of the price/performance curve, but in '10 I was burried in money so I bought the best parts I could find, and I've been thrilled with the box. In truth, anyupgrade now would be for vanity, as this does everything I could want.

I've been waiting a long time to upgrade. I'll be doing the whole 5960X with SLI 880 GTX and 32 GB DDR4 with three 512 GB SSDs in RAID 5. I have to wait until the 880 GTX comes out for the main purchases though as I don't have a desktop GPU. I'll pick up the CPU once I see the benchmarks. (There are leaked ones which indicate it's amazing and overclocks to 4 GHz easily).

I forget sometimes that there are gaps between Intel's general release schedule and their internal/partner release schedule. This stuff has been floating around for a while around here in the form of test-beds. Good stuff. For our purposes though there isn't much a difference between the previous haswell stuff and this stuff, except it benches higher on fine-grain parallel workloads, such as those using omp.

Most of what we use it for, besides benching, is running multi-process large volume compute jobs, which works just as well on fat multi-socket servers in a cluster as it does on a multi-core. So no, it's not going to make much of a difference to me. With regard to personal builds, I don't suspect I'll see that much of a difference between the older haswells and these.

Still waiting for something like Intel's Knights line to mature a bit to justify the inclusion in build rigs.

A bit too pricey for me, I'm still running an i7 3770k until the prices come down a bit as the difference doesn't justify paying over half my monthly salary for CPU/Mobo/RAM. Definitely upgrading my GTX580 soon though.

I'm already running dual SSDs on my end with i7-2600k and I have yet to experience any form of lag (the GeForce GTX 580 WAS a monster when it was released).

Corsair power supply, I'd avoid it actually. Mine surged and killed my two previous drives (one SSD and one HDD).

"I wanna know what lag is... I want you to shoowwww meeee"

Ordered the Asus X99 deluxe with the 5930k, and 32 GB RAM. Seems the faster RAM is still expensive and wasn't any available for shipping currently, so I got rather cheap 2133 mhz and will do with that for now and get 64 GB ~3Ghz once more vendors are available and prices drop. Already have 2 x 512GB Samsung 840 SSDs + a couple others.

Ordered a cheap PCI-express SSDs too.. that probably won't be of much use.. but gonna try and see if it can work with PCI passthrough in VirtualBox or VMWare to install a virtual machine on.

Ordered a cheap PCI-express SSDs too..

What do you put on the PCIe SSD (as opposed to on the SATA SSDs)? The OS?

Ordered a cheap PCI-express SSDs too..

What do you put on the PCIe SSD (as opposed to on the SATA SSDs)? The OS?

Same thing I guess.. just another way of connecting it :) Never tried one before.. but I'm interested to see if the performance is better for virtualization than using a normal virtual disk.