Building 1st Rig: Vol: For work, home, and some play. - Page 2

Honestly, if you plan to wait new boards, processors, and gpu's will be changing the game and what is a good deal now might not be by the time you're ready to roll. I wouldn't recommend buying the performance parts of your build then waiting. Even the prices of hdd's and ssd's are dropping so buy and hold is just a bad deal all around.

As for the build itself it looks OK. A little bit over mobo'd and lite on the gpu. The memory is a little high unless you know for a fact that the programs you plan on running for work need the extra memory you could just as easily get by with 8 and put the extra money into an ssd or better gpu...even a sweet monitor.

Your choice of memory is good. Corsair's Vengeance line is good quality, but they do have tall heat spreaders. If you use an aftermarket heatsink/fan (HSF) to cool your CPU, then you may run into problems fitting the memory under the heatsink or the attached fan(s). Corsair also has a low profile version of their Vengeance memory kits if you decide to use a large air CPU cooler. As far as I know, Intel's stock CPU coolers won't extend over the DIMM slots. Don't completely trust me on this, though. I haven't personally dealt with any of the Intel Core i series CPUs except for the i7-3930K, and it doesn't come with a CPU cooler.

Most people will tell you that you don't need 16GB of RAM, which is generally true. I can think of three reasons to need 16GB of memory or more... RAW photo editing, video editing, and virtualization (running multiple virtual machines). It is also possible that we all may need 16GB in order to do the things we'll be doing in the future so it may make sense to just buy the memory now and get it over with if you're planning to keep the same PC for a few years. I started off with 32GB of memory because I have an X79 board. I didn't want to have to throw away 16GB of RAM to upgrade to the max my motherboard supports in the future.

Your hard drive pick is also good. Western Digital's Caviar Black and RE# lines both carry a 5-year warranty, the longest warranty available. I have a handful of Seagate Barracudas that have lasted me between 1.5 and 2 years, but two months ago one of them totally failed. I replaced it with a WD RE4. Almost exactly one month later another Barracuda threw a S.M.A.R.T. error. I ordered another WD RE4 drive and added it as a hot spare to my RAID10 array so that it can automatically take over when that Barracuda finally dies. I'm glad that I had my drives in a RAID array with redundancy in addition to performance. It saved me the trouble of having to reinstall everything and recover from a backup. I loved those Barracuda model drives for performance, but I'd be worried to buy any in the future. They only had a 1 year warranty, so I'm forced to buy new ones as these die off.

I'd recommend that you go for an Antec, Seasonic, Corsair, or XFX power supply. Antec and Seasonic PSUs are highly reliable and do a fantastic job of keeping the power clean. Corsair and XFX PSUs are built for them by other companies (very often Seasonic), and they choose to rebrand very good quality PSUs. PC Power and Cooling PSUs are also good quality, but they don't make modular power supplies, so they may not be for you. The modular PSUs make cable management a lot easier, since you can use only those cables that you need.

Did you decide to go from an i7 to an i5 for any particular reason? Most gamers have no use for an i7 because there aren't any games that truly make use of more than 4 cores. Actually, most games only use 1 or 2 threads. If you use applications that do multitask efficiently or if you have a lot of programs going simultaneously, then an i7 may offer you better performance than an i5 can. Video encoding, Compiling, and Folding (and other idle time processor usage tasks) are all good examples of activities that can make good use of an i7 processor. What sorts of work do you do? Are there any specific applications that you use often?

That Asus Sabertooth Z77 motherboard should be interesting. Before I decided on the i7-3930K, I was looking at the i7-3770K and that motherboard. My reason for considering that board was because I do a bit of Software Defined Radio work, and any electromagnetic interference can screw with the received signal. I was hoping that the board's EFI shield would also keep some of the splatter that can be caused by the voltage regulators on the motherboard from getting out (not all VRs cause EFI, but if one of them is slightly out of spec it can cause problems for me that aren't covered by most companies' warranties). I ended up with an Asus motherboard for my X79 build, and it has some easy to use overclocking capabilities in the BIOS and some Windows utilities that are actually worth installing. I've been really happy with my motherboard, and I would imagine that the board you've picked would also be great.

I don't know anything at all about AMD/ATI GPUs. I have used NVidia cards for years because I had bad experiences with ATI cards "back in the day" when you couldn't get one to work in Linux and Windows games didn't like them. NVidia has put out some fantastic binary drivers for Linux that are exactly on par with the capabilities of the Windows drivers for several years now, so I have always leaned towards NVidia. I would probably buy a GTX 670 or a GTX 580 if I was in the market for a new graphics card right now. I suppose most people don't have issues with AMD/ATI cards these days, and they are the superior choice for bitcoin mining.

Let us know what you end up with and how you like it. If you want better info, then you should let us know what you plan on using your PC for, including what applications you will use the most and what sorts of games you want to be able to play.