Advice on my first build

[MTheoryFreak]

Hello,

I am about to undertake my first build. I am going back and forth between the 1155 pin and 2011 pin configuration. I have purchased a Cooler Master HAF X. It may just be me, but as I read reviews on various sites, there seems to be many issues with the 2011 - x79 boards. I will list below the 1155 configuration I was planning on going with. After viewing this, please reply on this option or if I should go with a x79 or wait for a bit and get an Ivy Bridge.

This is what I had in mind.

ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z
2700k
Either 7970 or gtx 680 (I can't decide here. It seems the 680 edges out the 7970 head to head, stock, card vs card. However, I plan on starting with a single monitor and later upgrading to three monitors. When I do this I would probably also grab another of which ever card I decide to go with. I was just wondering with the 7970 being 3gb, would the 7970 be superior under these circumstances.)

Not sure if I should go with 1000w power supply or 1200w.

I am basically building this for gaming, but I will use it for other things as well.
Any helpful advice or constructive criticism would be appreciated.

[AMDScooter]

Do you plan on overclocking? It's something that needs to be accounted for before I can offer my best advise. I'll guess for the moment that you will be at least moderately overclocking with decent air cooling for the CPU and stock for the GPU. That said..

For gaming you do not need anything the 2011~x79 chipset has to offer. A good z68~z77 setup paired with a moderately overclocked i5-2500k is a platform that will suit your gaming needs and save a few hundred dollars you can then put to use in other areas. I can say from first hand experience that a single overclocked 2500k has no problem pushing a pair of overclocked 7970's.

GTX 680 is the better deal right now. 7970 vs. 680 both moderately overclocked offer pretty equal performance with the 680 being $50 cheaper as of today's pricing. The GTX 680 appears to not suffer from the 2GB of ram it has at higher resolutions. 4GB 680's are said to be coming. If I had to make a choice buying today I'd get the 7970 3GB if my plans were for 3 monitors in the future.

Power supplies. 1k vs. 1200. Don't go cheap on a PS.. ever. A bad or marginal PS will outcost it's savings with stability issues that are hard as heck to troubleshoot. If you can afford a good quality 1200w get it.

GL

[yunk3r]

Since ivy bridge is coming out is under a month i would wait to make your decision then because even if you don't want ivy bridge the price of sandy bridge will most likely come down in price, also amd might adjust the price of the 7970 by then because the gtx 680 is faster. I would get the 7970 however because at triple monitor resolutions the extra ram helps. The performance difference starts to close at high resolutions and i believe that with overclocking it comes closer to if not beating the gtx 680 in performance.

[3dfxrain]

Dem solid state drives are nice.

[MTheoryFreak]

Thanks for the reply. I do plan on overclocking, however, it is all new to me so I will have to research a good bit before I give it a shot. As far as cooling goes, I had my eye on the Corsair H100. It seems to do a great job on all the reviews I have read. It is also fairly small compared to some of the air coolers. I was gonna go with a Zalman. I looked at several of them. It seems that they can get in the way of the first DIMM slot and seems to be heavy and I didn't want to stress the motherboard. I don't know if this is a legitimate concern or not.

As for going with the 2500k. I have read much on this and I could save about 100 dollars going this route. However, I am not to concerned about the extra hundred. I don't want to waste money, but if it would give me any benefits, maybe benefits not related to gaming then I would prefer the 2700k. I really don't want to spend more than around 350 for the cpu. One thought I had was the integratted graphic that come with the Sandy Bridge. I don't even know if this is possible, but could I use the integratted graphics to say push a blu-ray movie on my tv while I am also playing a game on my monitor through my graphics card. As this is my first build and my tech skills are entry level, I do not know the answer to this. Also, in your opinions what would be a reason for going with a 2700k over a 2500k?

I find I stress myself out a lot while trying to decide what to do. Lol. I really want to build a good solid system that I could game on ultra setting for hopefully 5 or 6 years. I don't mind spending 3 grand on the set up but I want it to last. Once again, thanks for taking time to read my post and answer.

[MTheoryFreak]

Dem solid state drives are nice.

I do plan on going with a 128GB Samsung SSD to run Windows 7. I will follow this with two 1TB HDDs in RAID 0. (I think) The one that shares the load and makes thing work more quickly. Behind this I will have a 2TB HDD to back up my data. Hopefully, this will be adequate and will give me a bit of security against data lose. Sound ok?

[AMDScooter]

H100 is a solid performer, should be fine no matter what chip you put under it.

As far as the 2700k vs. 2500k, they both overclock about the same. The difference being the slightly higher stock speed, more cache and hyper-threading on the 2700k. If you are overclocking the speed difference would be negated right off. The cache has minimal effect on gaming bordering on negligible. HT has actually been shown to inhibit performance in a few games while offering little to no benefit in many others. IMHO the 2700k is just not worth the premium in a gaming system. IMHO get the 2500k and spend the savings elsewhere. At the very least just get a 2600k and OC it avoiding the premium price of the 2700k.

As far as storage. A good fast SSD for the OS, apps and games is great idea. As for mass storage/spinning disks. I'd pass on the RAID0 + single drive backup and instead get 2 big drives in RAID1.