PC PC building & spec check

The case is almost as much as your GPU, same with the power supply, seems a bit exxy.
My Lian li brushed aluminum case only cost me $110 I think.

Edit- I meant your power supply almost costs as much as your GPU,

$195 is still a budget case though. It's at the high end of budget, don't get me wrong. When it comes to cases, you get what you pay for though imo.

This is the case I currently have running my WC setup http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=25_31&products_id=14840 It was one of the best options for me when I built it over 2 years ago, and is still a damn good case for the money.

yeh i forgot it would be some awesomo cooler case, for the record i can run my system fairly flatout with a standard type case, and it doesnt get too hot or lose performance, and im in Townsville. I thought all the new gear runs fairly cool nowadays to produce its power, didnt think you would need extra cooling unless your running games full out and at phsyco FPS to kill input lag.

I was talking more bout the power supply, its almost as dear as his GPU, thats crazy right?

edit - Oh i see why you said that, i edited my first message at work on my phone to say i meant the power supply not the case and it didnt go through

Generally, you are right about hardware running cooler these days Neishy. Until the GPU/CPU is so hot that it's about to melt, you won't notice any performance hit at all really. The problem is that the fans that cool them can get horrifically loud when under load, especially certain GPUs. My 2x6970s with the stock reference fans were so loud under load that they would send anyone mental. Luckily some come with non-reference coolers on them, which are usually much quieter, and cooler, but mine...did not.

The main reason I got such a free flowing case and went with water cooling is that I intended on overclocking the CPU and GPUs to the limit and keeping them there 24/7. At these speeds the fans would explode in a few days lol.

In regard to the Power supply....since when is $279 almost as much as $479? Are you referring to the Motherboard, which is $339?

MADCAP, you might want to go with an open circuit water cooling system, as the mobo and graphics cards have water cooling sections built in, just a thought

If you can wait till around May/June the new Intel Haswell CPU's will be out along with the Z87 motherboards

Good idea.

Lol yes, geez how many fails can I achieve with one post haha

Yeah, you did a good job of it man lol.

MADCAP, If I were you I would steer clear of AMD cards. Their cards are good...but the driver support, especially for crossfire is light years behind Nvidia. If you were going just a single card it wouldn't be as much of an issue, but if going multiple cards I would go Nvidia.

Cheers Chevwah, i have decided to go with the EVGA GTX 680 card instead... few bux more but i hear good things about them

Altered my cart with some changes to GPU / MOBO & PCU
Intel Core i7 3770K Intel Core i7 3770K In stock $345.00
Gigabyte G1-Sniper3 Motherboard $355
2 x EVGA GeForce GTX 680 2GB $509 ea
Corsair AX1200 Gold Power Supply $325
Corsair Obsidian 650D Case Corsair Obsidian 650D Case In stock $195.00
Corsair Hydro Series H100i CPU Cooler Corsair Hydro Series H100i CPU Cooler In stock $145.00
G.Skill Trident X F3-2400C10D-16GTX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 In stock $169.00
Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM001 Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM00 In stock $99.00
Corsair Force Series GT 120GB SSD In stock $139.00
BitFenix Internal USB3.0 Adapter In stock $12.00

Excellent choice. They are a bloody good card. With 2 in SLI you will match/exceed the power of a GTX690...which is a $1100-$1200 card, and for $100-$200 less. Then you can OC them if you need to. In 90% of games they outperform the HD7970 as well, so very wise choice.

too many people are having issues with the NVidia drivers. Games don't run any better with NVidia. In fact, there are more problems with NVidia than there are with AMD.

There will always be issues with certain cards with certain games, but AMD seems to be much slower with driver updates for newer games, especially when it comes to crossfire.

I have found that I can only see positive crossfire scaling on about half the games I play....and that is due to AMDs laziness when it comes to crossfire profiles. For example..it took them about 6 months to sort out Skyrim's negative crossfire performance....and it still wasn't overly fantastic. Skyrim was a massive launch title, and they should have been prepared.

The issue of Skyrim brings up another point....I don't think a lot of these console ported games react very well with crossfire, but seem to work 100% fine with Nvidia. I have no idea why, but SLI just seems to be a better multi card system. This is what I have experienced and I know a huge number of others who will back me up.

how come more people are having problems with NVidia cards? because the games themselves don't support those cards as much as the AMD cards. For instance, WoW, SWtOR, iRacing etc. have all had more problems with NVidia.

In terms of single card compatibility there is no evidence that one is better than the other when it comes to the thousands of games out there. In terms of driver updates though, I would say Nvidia is much better, especially in multi card situations.

I was talking in terms of dual card use

Hey Chevwah - your thoughts on the MSI Z77 MPOWER mobo

I've seen, or can find no evidence of this.