Building New Machine, Few Questions...Follow

Are you buying a sound card because you really want it (hook up to a professional speaker set-up) or because you think you'll need it? Onboard sound has come a long way in the last 18 years and you likely won't need it unless you have special audio plans.

Conventional wisdom is that an i7 isn't a significant enough upgrade form an i5 for gaming purposes to justify the cost. Unless you're planning on CPU intensive tasks such as high def video editing, you could probably step down to an i5.

Edited, Apr 2nd 2013 11:56am by Jophiel

I'd rather have the $70 than the sound card but that's just me. Sounds like you already bought it and I don't know what their return policy is but $70 is enough to leave on the table (to me) that I'd find out.

If the i7 was a good price there's no reason to worry about it and you certainly won't HURT for owning it. I have an i7 in my system (old Lynnfield model though, i7-890) and it does what I need it to do.

Avoid anything OCZ like the plague. Their stuff is crap, it will fail, you will lose all your data. That being said, it will probably be nice and fast for you right up until it does fail. Which it will. Soon.

Look for a good price on a Samsung 840 series drive if you want the fastest SSD out there. Otherwise, A crucial, Corsair, Intel, Kensington, or really any other company other than OCZ SSD will work. SSD's are reliable unless made by OCZ, but you would also want to stick in a pair of data drives in a raid 1 mirror array (all data exists on both hard drives) for data storage and backup. You should be able to get a pair of 500 GB drives for under $110. 130Gb is also really tiny to run an OS off of if you install alot of games. Windows 7 averages 30-70 GB, another 10-12 GB per game, call it 5 Gb for the user profile, etc. eats up space quickly. take a look at your existing computer and see how close you are to 120 GB. If you are still on XP, add 30GB to be safe to the final size. Thats what you can expect to have for an operating partition size.

I like Asus boards in general. the sabertooth socket 1155 board does have a known overheating issue though. if you get one, you'll want to remove that motherboard cover from it. Aside from that nice board though. The sound on the board is 7.1 surround, which is technically better than the sound card you specced out. I'd either opt for a higher end soundblaster card, or go with onboard sound personally. For a dedicated gaming rig, The cheaper Asus Maximus V Gene http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131830 would be a better choice unless you need the extra PCI express slots.

Good case, essentially the same layout as the Cooler Master CM690 II.

If you are willing to spend $320 on an I7 processor, you should probably consider moving to a Socket 2011 processor and board instead of a socket 1155. The 2011 processors are on average 30% faster, and have double the ram slots. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&N=100006676&isNodeId=1&Description=2011
For example, the i7-3820 would be $20 cheaper and faster than the 3770k you have specced out. The hexacore versions start at $560, but if you are eliminating the sound card anyways... The downside to the socket 2011 is that you have to provide a heat sync of some sort. They don't come with one, so thats at least $20-$80 depending on make. (you want this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835181030) Motherboard costs would be about the same. If you're up in the upper end range already anyways, it makes sense to me to go for the extra performance and cores. Unless you already bought the other one for a really good deal in which case nevermind but I'm still not going to erase this part because its already typed damn it.

Ram and PSU still works either way. i'd reccommend going with a larger PSU just because your system would be ideal for adding a second video card in SLI later on down the line to get a performance boost, but you would need around an 850 watt for that. The PSU you have specified will be fine for the single card. Video Card is a kind of no name manufacturer, but the card itself should be solid.

I disagree. It really depends on the game you are running and where your limiting factors in the system are. For this particular build with that video card, the processor would be the slow component as an I5. Flight sims are very CPU intensive for example, as are certain other genres. Certanly video card is more important, but when you are already at a 670, CPU becomes very important.

if you dont overclock you wont need one. Assuming of course you bought a CPU that comes with one.

Edited, Apr 10th 2013 10:47am by KTurner