Out of Pod Experience

INB4 Surfin's PlunderBunny

For £1000 you can easy bulid a monster PC, so dont pay atention on every hardcore hardware aspect like RAM latency times discusion of harware forums made by hardware warriors ;) etc, i was able to run 3 clients on few year old computer with old amd 64 x2 4800+ , gf 9600gt, 3.25 ram (xp system) at medium details and two clients with max detals, modern custom PC for price around £1000 may easy stand to 3 clients whith full details at once, personaly i have no idea how this work on dual monitor, since always i use one minitor and 2-3 eve clients in window mode.

Buy Pc parts and be sure you got some PC service in your home area with people who know how to bulid custom PC , espetialy if you dont know how to bulid custom PC or if you got problem with BIOS setings voltages etc.

Don't let the man keep you down.

cheers for the reply, i was hoping around 1000 would be reasonable but is that a little much do you think?

will deffo consider the part about getting some servicing.

Heres what im at so far:

GeForce GTX 660 ti
i5 3570k
Seagate 750gb
8gb Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600Mhz
Intel 330 Series 180GB 2.5 inch Solid State Drive
ASUS motherboard (im pretty sure this is compatible, but if anyone could double check in case ive misunderstood would appreciate it.

All above costs around £620 at a quick glance so far.

Still unsure what im gonna do about the PSU, ive been looking at some 600w but am unsure if thats powerful enough.

Not really looked at cases yet, will do later on.

Monitors, mouse and keyboard il sort out later on.

EDIT: Actually, that HDD isn't really what I'd look for. It's not a big deal since you also have an SSD, but it's an enterprise version (which usually cost a tad more) and an old sata II drive. If t[/quote]

What about this?


HDD

PSU rule of thumb: When you want a gaming system and your PSU has word Green in its name, that is wrong PSU for your build.

RAM

With the SSD as OS drive, if you leave the swap file on it (you probably should), you want your swap file to be used as little as possible, so more RAM is always a good thing.
The OS itself plus some minor but usual stuff (IM clients and such) easily eats up to about 2 GB of RAM, each EVE instance could eat up to about 2 GB RAM each (most likely around 1 GB tops most of the time, but you never know), so that's almost 8 GB of RAM potentially occupied already.
So get at least 16 GB of RAM, just to be on the safe side. RAM is relatively cheap these days anyway.
Might as well get 32 GB of RAM, because, eh, why the hell not, you're still quite a lot under your initial budget.

SSD / HDD

You might also want to get the 240 GB SSD version instead of the 180 GB one (same series, same manufacturer), it's faster to begin with, and has other benefits.
SSDs in general also work better with plenty of free space left on them, and last longer due to the wear leveling having ample storage alternatives. Try to always keep it at least 10% empty, preferably a lot more empty.

Also, while you're at it, upgrade the "slow" HDD to at least 2 TB, preferably even 3 TB. Heck, get TWO identical slow 3 TB drives and link'em up in single partition RAID mode, for a single huge 6 TB media storage partition.
Stuff adds up fast.
I have one internal 2 TB drive, and three external ones - 500 GB, 2 TB and 3 TB, for about 7.5 TB total storage space. I have less than 2 TB free space combined across all drives, and managing what goes on what drive starts to get annoying. For instance, I have about 40 GB of books and over 2 TB of various TV shows stored locally, among others.
What would you use it for ?
High-def movies eat up quite a bit each, whole TV shows (also especially if in high-def), games get larger and larger it seems too, FRAPS barely compressed captures are insanely large (especially at higher resolutions, 2GB per minute could be fairly normal), Have loads of stuff on CDs and DVDs and don't feel like hearing the noisy spin-up of the optical drive ? Image it on the HDD and use it from there instead. And so on and so forth.
Once you have the space, you'll notice it won't be long until you fill it. And then you want even more of it.


VIDEO CARD

The GTX 660 is already sufficient for your requirements, has a decent price/performance ratio for the time being, and will VERY QUICKLY lose it, as new generations of video cards keep popping up every 9 to 12 months tops.
Heck, even a GTX 650 would be borderline appropriate too, and noticeably cheaper, and you also have the GTX 650 Ti in between.
If really you want a GTX 660 Ti and can afford it, sure, why not, I guess that's ok too, but more than that, I wouldn't really recommend it.
Looking at the GTX 670 for instance, next year, some card that's roughly 60% in price and probably yields more FPS wile also eating up less power will come out almost surely, so, "meh" on purchasing top of the line video cards.

POWER SOURCE

There's only TWO things you need from a PSU - protection from bad power quality (it might be very important in some cities), and being able to power whatever stuff you use (enough power connectors, enough amps on the rails).
Only one of those is exclusive to the PSU, since you can always just buy a decent UPS to protect you from bad power quality, and also provide you with some power to get you over short outages.
A PSU's rail amperage slowly dwindles in time with use (the closer to max power you use it at, the faster it decreases in peak capacity ; also efficiency is greatest at around half peak load), so generally, you might want to get a PSU that's rated at around 130%-150% of the peak wattage your machine is likely to consume (most of the time, your machine will use noticeably less anyway).

Ballparking it, mobo+RAM probably eats up around 75W, a 3570K has a 77W TDP, a single GTX 660 Ti is 150W TDP, so that's roughly 300 W so far, add about 20W for the HDD,SSD, fans, optical drive and some USB stuff, and you get 320W, so you want a PSU that's rated for 420-480W or thereabouts. A 450 W PSU will do fine, a 550 W PSU will be a bit much (but won't really hurt).

You could for instance get an affordable "brand name" lower power PSU with decent built-in protections, like, say, for instance, a Corsair Builder series 430W, which is relatively cheap and reliable.
Or almost the same, but the 500W model, if you're thinking long term and with a touch of paranoia. Or the 600W model, if you might want to consider SLI mode or heavy overclocking (I would advise AGAINST either).
Or you could get a "nobrand" 550W PSU and a 600++VA UPS, which would be more expensive, but also more likely to be useful in iffy conditions.

COOLING

You could get a moderately affordable, nicely ventilated case, with all the needed fans from the start. Something like a Cooler Master HAF 912, for instance.
Alternatively, get a "whatever" case, a big 120mm (or larger, depends what fits in the case) fan for the front (sucking air into the case), and either one large or two small fans (depends on what case you get) blowing air out the back of the case. The PSU will also be blowing air out, and the video card too (might also be blowing some of it inside, depends on what type of card you get).
What fans you need highly depend on the case you're getting, whatever fits in it.

Water cooling can be somewhat more delicate to use, and unless you want heavy-duty overclocking (again, I would strongly advice against that), or unless you live in a hellish temperature area (in which case, better get AC in the house anyway), it's not really necessary anyway.
Heck, even the stock air cooler that comes with the CPU should be more than sufficient without any overclocking (especially if you also disable the turboboost) with even just two or three dust cleanings per year

RAM: Corsair 16gb DDR3 1600MHz

SSD: 240gb SATA 6gb/s

HDD: WD 2TB 6gb/s

Graphics: GTX 660

PSU: Corsair 500w

Motherboard: ASUS

CPU: i5 3570k

Case: Coolermaster HAF 912

Monitor: Samsung 23 inch

Costs £1082 again at a quick glance, so probably about a grand as i originally went for.

Hows it look?

Processor and RAM purchased, found a different case ill also probably be getting now.

Thanks a lot for all the help and good info, the feedback mixed with my own research has been great, have learned loads that a week ago would have just been jargon.

Will be back up and running in game soon hopefully :)


Thanks again,
Jay
o7


EDIT: Also gonna look at motherboards again