Alrighty Massassi, I've been out of the PC building process for a couple of years now and I'm on the verge of building a new machine. I need recommendations for motherboard, processor and video card. My budget is $1000-$1300 for the whole machine. Any help out there?

Any special needs? When you say 'whole machine' does that budget include monitor?

Here's my generic recommendations:

Intel Core i5-2500K $220
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115072

ASRock Z68 Extreme3 $125
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157271

Geil 8gb DDR3-1600 CL9 $43
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820144486

XFX HD6870 1gb $175
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150561

There's alot of room to save money, I assumed maybe overclocking, maybe interested in Crossfire/SLI in future, ect. I aimed for the $1000 budget limit which would give you room to make some changes and buy a monitor if needed. Harddrive prices are a little insane right now, cheapest 7200rpm 1TB drive I see on newegg is $150. But even assuming you buy that harddrive, needed Win7 OEM x64, Case, 600w PSU, DVDRW, that still left me with $200 for videocard. Your best buy in that budget is a 6870 (it performs a little better than it's Nvidia price counterpart the GTX560). Wasnt able to squeeze a decent SSD into that budget.

I have two 1TB drives lying around and a 500Gb one. I'm going SSD drive, like [h=1]Crucial M4 CT064M4SSD2 2.5" 64GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (has good reviews)[/h]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148441

[h=1]COOLER MASTER HAF 932 Advanced RC-932-KKN5-GP Black Steel ATX Full Tower Compucase Case with USB 3.0, Black Interior and Four Fans-1x 230mm front RED LED fan, 1x 140mm rear fan, 1x 230mm top fan, and 1x 230mm side fan[/h]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119160
[h=1]Rosewill BRONZE Series RBR1000-M 1000W Continuous@40°C, 80Plus Bronze Certified,Modular Cable Design,ATX12V v2.3/ EPS12V,SLI Ready,CrossFire Ready,Active PFC"Compatible with Core i7, i5" Power Supply[/h]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182188
Thanks Triscut. Keep em coming guys! Let me know what you think should be changed. Right now, I'm sitting around $1063 spent. So, I got three hundredish I of room to modify.

Those are all solid choices, I think if you have cash to spare sink it get the best videocard you can afford.

It won't bother you that your case has a red led fan, and your power supply has a blue led fan?

Negatory. I did a casemod a few years back and put a disco-ball in a case once.

1000W is ridiculously overkill. Drop down to about 600W and get a good reliable brand, like SeaSonic.

Oh, and IMO the In-Win BUC is a better case to work with (although less, and smaller fans). It is still one of the highest rated on Anandtech, it's damn quiet, and it's pretty cheap too.

Above 500w and below 150 dollars, a good brand like corsair and you're good.

See, I've killed power supplies before by putting too much on them. Are things honestly that green that I can get away with a smaller PSU? And Matty, I go full tower because it is not going anywhere and I hate messing with mid-tower cases. If I want to game at another location, I have my laptop. I guess I should tell you what all I will be doing with it. I will be using it for gaming (obviously), photo/video editing.

Well dunno what your aiming for but 1000w is overkill any single GPU system. I picked 900w for my system because I do hope to goto 2 x GTX580 once I can find one for <$200.

Don't fool yourself into thinking that In-Win BUC is in any regards "small". Also, the reason I recommend it is because you don't have to mess with it, it's a pleasure to work in. It's your decision, just don't hate on it too much.

A 600W power supply, even with what you're putting into it, will cover that with enormous room to spare. The only reason you'd ever have to go above 600W is if you're cramming it with TOP of the line multi-GPU crap, and some extra drives on top of it. Seriously. I have a Core 2 Duo overclocked to 4GHz, 6 (yes 6) inefficient hard drives, a decently power-hungry Radeon 4870, and accessory cards. Not to mention all my USB ports being filled. Even with all that, I don't think I've ever seen it pull 400W, much less anything near 600W. And that's measured from my UPS!

The real reason your PSU's likely died is because they were pieces of crap, not because you were putting too much on them. People buy 1000W PSUs thinking they need them, when in reality the only reason they need that high is because they're buying unreliable crap PSUs to start with.

Also remember that PSUs may or may not be able to actually deliver what's marked on the box. Not unheard of for **** companies to put 1000w on a 500w PSU because it's rare for anyone to crack that much wattage.

Personally I would go for an i7 over the i5. Games are starting to take advantage of multi core procs. Also with video and photo editing you can bet that if you are using a half way decent program it will also work faster with more cores.

The i5 and the i7 have the same number of cores. The i7 simply has hyperthreading, which does not always equate to the same level of improvement that you would expect from 8 cores (in some rare cases, it can actually do nothing at all for you).

Er yeah. Thanks for that correction. I was thinking i3. And as far as hyperthreading, it has been proven to actually slow down some processes. So nix what I said before.

I have a theory that the only reason Intel included 2mb more cache on the new i7's is to compensate for the negative effect Hyperthreading has in some situations. Even with the extra cache and +100mhz clockspeed, you still find the occasional benchmark that shows the i5-2500k beating the i7-2600k.



Seriously unless you know you can make use of hyperthreading, save yourself $100.