remotedevice

Honorable
Dec 27, 2012
2
0
10,510
I'm putting together my first ever build and have been spending way too much time researching stuff. Thought I'd throw it out to you all in hopes of getting the last bit of guidance/courage needed to pull the trigger on buying these parts. Looking to get going on this in the next couple of weeks before my work starts to heat up again.

My goal is to put together a strong gaming system which will also function as my primary home office computer -- I do a lot of media stuff w/ Photoshop, Premiere, Unity, etc. I want to be able to tweak and expand things over the next few years, experiment with overclocking (which I realize would entail a 3570k, which I'm semi-open to but I am trying to keep the budget down) and ultimately add another 660 ti via SLI. I only have one monitor now but the dream would be to go for a sweet three monitor surround setup down the road. I don't want to dive into liquid cooling right away but could go there in the future (and might have to?), who knows.

Anyway, here's the planned build. Any opinions would be much appreciated:

Motherboard
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H

RAM
16GB G. Skill Ripjaws X 14900CL10D-16GBXL

CPU
Intel Core i5-3570

CPU Cooler
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo

GPU
MSI N660 Ti PE 2GD5/OC 192-bit

PSU
Corsair Enthusiast TX750 750W

SSD
SanDisk Extreme SDSSDX-240G

HD
Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB 7200

DVD
Samsung DVD Burner SH-224BB

Case
Fractal Design R4 Black Pearl

As of today, this all adds up to about $1250 on Newegg, which is close to the ceiling of my budget. I feel like a couple of the components might be overkill, and, simultaneously, that I'm missing some stuff that will be necessary (additional fans, for example).
 

admbautista

Honorable
Oct 29, 2012
333
0
10,810
If I were you I would finalize my mind if I'll overclock or not, this would save you money. With the items you listed above, if you won't overclock,
1. Change you board to h77.
2. Drop the cooler.

If you want a rig that is open for overclock, then change the cpu to k version.

Additional fans might not be necessary for now, but maybe when you added another 660 ti. or overclocked.
 

remotedevice

Honorable
Dec 27, 2012
2
0
10,510
@admbautista - thanks for your advice. I think I'm pretty set on messing around with overclocking in the future, although due to time constraints (work heats up around Jan 10th), I'd like to just concentrate on getting the system up and running at stock speeds for now. So I probably will switch to the k version and keep the cooler.