Building My First High End PC

[Mondrayish]

Hi all,

Just wanted to say hi to all the ROG members here as I'm new here.

The first time I assembled a PC on my own was back in the Pentium 3 days. Ever since then, I just bought pre-assembled PCs from NCIX and whatnot.

Now that I work, I can afford some of the higher quality stuff in the market and decided to take up the costly hobby of DIY PCs. So I did some reading these past couple of weeks to catch up with today's technology. And these are the parts I decided to aim for.

Motherboard: Rampage IV Extreme
Chipset: 3930K
GPU: ROG Matrix II GTX580 (plan to get a 2nd one to SLI in the future if performance start declining on new games)
RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws Z 2133 MHz DDR3 CL9 16GB kit
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100
PSU: CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 1200W
SSD: OCZ 240GB Agility 3 SSD SATA III
HDD:
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion
Chassis: Cosmos II / HAF-X RC-942 / NZXT Switch 810 / Thermaltake lvl10GT / Corsair Obsidian 800D (All the forums and reviews say they are all good with regards to air flow and space management, can't decide)

The goals for this rig are as follows (in order of importance):
1. Gaming Performance: 80 - 90 FPS on Crysis 2 @ Extreme/Ultra setting (w/o overclocking)
2. Aesthetics (Internal/External): Aesthetics is pretty important to me but not the deal breaker
3. Practicality vs. Price: Looking for a balance between price and practicality. (Preferably below US$2,800 just to prove to a friend that the Razer Blade is a waste of money)
4. Overclocking: Because I'm still noob at this, overclocking is quite low on my list... for now... But I chose to go with ROG components as they seem pretty overclocking friendly for the new overclocker.

Just wanted to hear your critique/advice/tips/suggestions on what works, what wouldn't work and what I can do and what I shouldn't do, what's effective and what's not and how to get the most out of the hardware and software. Basically I just want to learn whatever I can from the rest of you more experienced ROG folks.

Without the chassis and HDD right now, pricing is slightly under US$2,800. Since it's a purely gaming machine, I decided an SSSD alone would be enough. I'm willing to go over if the performance justifies the cost.

Your thoughts? All feedback is appreciated

Mondrayish

[UltraNEO_]

Area 66 wrote:
Crutial are very popular, we usually ear Crutial and Intel as recommendations

I'm gonna forgive you cause I know you meant "crucial" 😉 and yeah, they do have a few great models.

[Menthol]

Have you looked at Case Labs cases, they are top notch and very customizable.

[Mondrayish]

Menthol wrote:
Have you looked at Case Labs cases, they are top notch and very customizable.

Yea I did look at Caselab's Magnum line. I've looked at LD, Caselabs, and DD. I know a lot can be done in them. But I just couldn't see myself owning one of those industrial server looking type towers. That's why ended up with MM's U2-UFO. Wanted something unique but didn't want it to be a giant rectangular box. Also needed something that housed 10+PCI as I may be using up all my PCIe slots. I don't know I'm still a bit shaky on the case. I've been back and forth with several cases. I need some input that will make me pull the trigger on the U2-UFO.

I went with Vertex 4 just because it has the 5 year warranty and it was much cheaper than the Intel 520 series. For the Caviar Greens, since they're just mainly for storage of music and movies, I thought the green was fine.

CPU and motherboard, I have the Asus Rampage IV Extreme and 3930K. For the graphics, I agree that a single GTX680 is more than sufficient to play any of today's games. Was able to test drive the Palit GTX680 Jetstream and it works like a charm. Thing is, this PC build is my personal dream/extreme PC. My current PC can run today's games at decent settings. I wanted to upgrade from that and experience something topnotch.

[Silver_Wolf]

I have a couple comments on this, I would definitely recommend the Intel 520 Series SSD's they are currently the best out there for numerous reasons namely they have a deal with the manufacurers and have all their own parts and a controller they designed. Secondly I wouldn't go for the Caviar Green as a second drive although they have lots of store they are Eco drives so run slower and will giver you less performance even if it isn't your main drive.

As for cases 2 I can definitely recommend are the Coolermaster Storm Sniper especially the AMD Dragon Edition its a really large case with heaps of room. I used to have one but recently changed to an Aerocool X Predator which also looks amazing especially the scale like vents on the top definitely worth a look.

One thing I am wondering is why you are going for both fans and water cooling? Perhaps I have misread somewhere (As it is almost 11pm here and I have worked all day so thats quite possible) but the water cooling is just for the cpu? If so look at a coolermaster V6 or V8 instead in my opinion as they also add some cool looks to your case.

I usually lean more towards Corsair for RAM and I can sing the praises of the Corsair Dominator GT as I run 16gb of it on my ROG Crosshair.

And finally you don't seem to have mentioned Which CPU or Mobo you are getting? And final thought is SLI may not really be required for todays games. i run a single GTX 680 and have no issues at all, if you want to go for it then do so this is just my 2c on the matter 🙂

[pipe216]

If I read it correctly, the fans are to be attached to the radiator. I agree with Silver Wolf, instead of Caviar Green, I suggest going for the Caviar Black as it gives more performance, even though it's only for data.

Other than that, looks like it'll be an excellent build!

Good luck!

[Menthol]

It looks like you know what you want as far as hardware, 2 or 3 670's or 680's or a couple 690's would give you the GPU horsepower to play any game you want. Cases are a personnel thing, i prefer the plain understated look.