Out of Pod Experience

Seems good, but is getting a soundcard really necessary?

SSDs are super expensive though are they not?

If you call 150 bucks super expensive, then I guess.
Edit: whoa it´s around 200$ on newegg. That dollar of yours really is going down the drain fast.
Also it´s fricken irrelevant what the damn newest next generation chip will have.

It´s like still riding the bike because the newest Ferarri is going to be so much sweeter than that "old Porsche".

But I´m not going to annoy further with preaching about SSDs, seeing is believing I guess.

Next month, everything changes...however:

Tower - kinda ugly, but w/e
MB - next month...
DVD - No blu-ray?
Processor - was updated last year to 2700, and, next month...
HDD - good for storage, poor for main. Go SSD for O/S and applications - the drive you've chosen would become a bottleneck.
RAM - 16 minimum....RAM is cheap right now, even 1600Mhz.
PSU - No comments to make other than reputation of CM is good.
SC - Never heard of it/them
GPU - 570 gets replaced next month by 2GB 670GTX. Fermi is two years old.

Long & Short: not bad, but not good. You'll be cursing the reflection in the mirror if you stayed with that exact spec in 30 days time.

AK

2 X SSD in RAID-0 are better, with a 3rd HDD platter in SATA3 for storage.

Hybrid drives are interesting, but you must use them as the primary partition, which means the goal of super-fast storage access speeds is dimished due to running the same drive for your O/S + Applications.

Running SSD in RAID-0 for non-critical storage+applications gives you better price versus performance than a Hybrid.

Besides, if you can visibly tell the difference between 900 mb/s on a SSD RAID-0 and a Hybrid; I'd like to borrow you brain for TF2 to improve reaction times.

The other thing missing from the post is the monitor - because this means everything, as far as I'm concerned, as it displays the sum of your rig.

AK

Go for a 2500k instead of 2600k. Unless you do a lot of CPU heavy tasks with very specific applications (rendering, encoding, etc), a 2500k will serve you perfectly for gaming. I would recommend an aftermarket CPU cooler though, the stock sandy bridge coolers are a bit meh.

Ditch the soundcard. Unlike what most manufacturers like Creative and co would like to have you think, on-board sound is excellent, unless you're an audiophile who can hear the difference between 320kbit mp3 and FLAC and need a digital output.

Get a different PSU. 750 is overkill for the setup. You'll just end up wasting power. A decent, gold certified 600w PSU will serve you perfectly - Check jonnyguru.com for more information on why this is important (a site dealing exclusively with PSU's). You will not ever 'need' SLI, there's no point getting a PSU for that purpose. SLI sucks unless you're willing to constantly tweak and fix your system and deal with massive heat issues unless you really know what you're doing.

RAM is incredibly cheap at the moment, you don't need "high end RAM" - It's just a marketing gimmick. I got some Corsair Vengeance sticks, they're damn cheap but still damn good.



Get an SSD, 128gb (not more, not less). Give it a 96 GB partition (for overprovisioning and increasing it's lifespan significantly). Install Windows and your most use applications, try and keep around 30-40GB free at all times.

This will give you a massive performance boost in everyday tasks. It makes the system feel incredibly snappy. Do mind, this does not bring you any ingame improvements - This is just the use of the system in other, everyday tasks.

Use a normal HDD for games and other stuff, i'd heavily recommend a WD Caviar (black preferred, blue is good too though).



If you want to use more than 1 monitor at any point, get a videocard with at least 2gb memory.

Ivy bridge released at the end of the month or early next month, price/performance kinda the same for less watts, screw Sandy bridge, just wait, power supply of 750W is much too big, even 550W is large for what you said you want, screw a second video card because two cards is junk, and holy s-word yes, SSD, n-word please, you must get some, damn!

You'd be surprised how responsive the PC feels with an SSD. Small file read/write, the most frequent HD activity, is something an SSD does faster than a HDD by a factor of 50+. That's almost 2 orders of magnitude.

Starting apps, simply 'doing stuff' feels a lot faster with an SSD.

I guess my point was more that, even if you don't care about the newest most expensive parts, once next month comes around, all of the stuff your about to buy will all drop in price close to 40%. So whether you want the newest best thing, or want what you listed. it's a waste right now.