Building An AMD based System For Friend

[mrcacciatore]

So I am building a gaming system for a friend. The price is around $1500.
Here are the parts.
ASUS 24x DVD-RW Drive, SATA, OEM, Black
NZXT Phantom 410 Case, Black & White
Corsair Hydro Series H60 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Kingston SSDNow V300 Solid State Drive, 120GB
Seagate 1TB Desktop HDD SATA III w/ 64MB Cache
G.SKILL RipjawsX Series 8GB PC3-17000 Dual Channel DDR3 Kit (2 x 4GB)
ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z w/ Dual DDR3 2400, 7.1 Audio, Gigabit Lan, CrossFireX / 3-Way SLI
AMD FX-8350 Processor 4.0GHz w/ 16MB Cache
Corsair RM Series RM650 Modular Power Supply
The video card will be a R9 280X, but I'm not sure if I want the ASUS ROG Matrix version or the DirectCUII version.
The Operating system will be Windows 8 (upgrading to 8.1 later).
Do you guys have any suggestions or thoughts on the build? Anything that I can improve?

 

[mrcacciatore]

The other thing too is that because I will do some overclocking on my CPU and from what I know AMD isn't the best for good power consumption and also I hear that the bigger coolers on the ASUS versions of the 280x consume quite a bit of power, is a 650 watt PSU enough? I can upgrade to the 750 watt version for like 10 more dollars so that's not much of a big deal.

 

[mrcacciatore]

The other thing too is that because I will do some overclocking on my CPU and from what I know AMD isn't the best for good power consumption and also I hear that the bigger coolers on the ASUS versions of the 280x consume quite a bit of power, is a 650 watt PSU enough? I can upgrade to the 750 watt version for like 10 more dollars so that's not much of a big deal.

 

[tiny voices]

The h60 is junk. It won't cool any better than an air cooler. Save the money and get a coolermaster hyper 212 evo.

Everything else looks good.

650w will be plenty even with overclocking. No need for 750w.

 

[mrcacciatore]

I was considering the Hyper 212 evo but the only reason I am going to go with the H60 is that I know it works, people say it works and I like the aesthetic of having the water block instead of a larger heatsink in the middle of the case.

 

[tiny voices]

Personally I do not like closed loop water coolers at all. They are loud, tacky (not REAL watercooling), and don't cool better than air. I would get the Coolermaster hyper 212 evo over the h60 everyday and twice on sunday.

 

[mrcacciatore]

Fair enough. I have a brother that uses the H60 in his system and it works fine. Once again, the only reason I would go with the H60 over the Hyper 212 evo is the just the look. I mean if I had more money I would just go with the H100i or something on those lines.

 

[tiny voices]

Most people on here will ell you that closed loop coolers aren't really worth it and Air is the way to go. Honestly your system looks WAY more serious with a nice air cooler in it than some all-in-one closed loop cooler.

I would take a Noctua NH-D14 over an an h100i all day.

 

[mrcacciatore]

Well thanks for the feedback and I guess I'll take the Hyper 212 back into consideration.

 

[tiny voices]

I definitely would. Nothing beats it for even double the price. Glad I could help!