Black Friday, it's build time

[lasserith]

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
gaming

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
1000ish (don't think I'll run into budget issues.)

3) Which country do you live in? If the U.S, please tell us the state and city if possible.
Raleigh NC, so I have a compusa but no microcenter

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. The word "Everything" is not a valid answer. Please list out all the parts you'll need.
CPU, GPU, MOBO, DVD combo drive, CPU cooler, SSD

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
Rosewill HIVE-750 I just picked up on sale, heard good things about it. White NZXT phantom for a case and 8gb of 1600 Vengeance ram I got for 30 bucks. I also have a 1tb external I'm planning on making an internal drive.

6) Will you be overclocking?
not initially

7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it?
My main monitor will probably be a tiny 20 ish inch Vizio but occasionally I'll get a chance to hook up to a 42 inch tv which will be 1080p so I'm building towards that.

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
Buying tonight through Monday, building December.

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video? etc.
Sli is it honestly.

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?
Win 7 pro 64 bit.

I've already pretty much got the parts I need in my shopping cart just waiting for midnight to hit, but I figured I'd run em by all you guys first to see if I missed something.

i5 2500k (obviously)
Thermalright True Spirit 120 (Is the thermal compound it comes with any good or should I grab some?)
Asus p8z68-v pro (Not sure if the gen 3 is worth it for 40 dollars more, doesn't really seem like it to me).
Corsair Force Series 3 (120 gb)
Saphire 6970 (2gb probably the ref cooler version)

The SSD is what I'm really unsure about, I want to partition it and use 40 gigs for a SRT cache and the rest for OS and possibly Skyrim but I'm not sure if this is the best option or not? I've heard I need to leave a certain amount of space empty for best performance and I'm not sure how to fit my whole steam install on the SSD. Anyways advice?

 

[Dmac122383]

About your question about housing your steam library on a SSD, you could use a program called "Steam Mover" and keep all your games downloaded on a seperate drive then transfer the games you actively play back to the SSD. You can transfer the games between multiple drives pretty easy and quickly using "Steam Mover"

 

[Forceman]

I wouldn't spend the extra money on the Gen 3 motherboard - PCIe just isn't that big a deal. I assume this is the Newegg deal that prices the PRO about the same as the vanilla -V? If not, you can easily save some money by just getting the vanilla - th eonly difference is the PRO has 2 extra SATA 6 GB ports.

I would also swap out the Corsair SSD for a Crucial M4 - the Corsair uses the Sandforce controller, which has a history of problems.

The thermal compound that comes with the cooler is fine, but you can always grab some MX-4 if you want, depending on the price.

As for using the SSD, don't fool with SRT - just install the OS and your most commonly used applications and games on it, and either use symbolic links or something like Steam Mover (mentioned above) to put the stuff you don't use much on the hard drive.

 

[lasserith]

That pretty much answered all my questions thanks so much. First build since I put together a socket 939 build on an asus A8N5X which is impressively still running smoothly.