Here's what I got so far: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/Jc24wP
I'll have 3 hard drives and an optical drive with 3-4 fans running at low RPM in this machine. Is the PSU enough? This kind of confused me.
Thanks to everyone for their time.
The PSU is more than enough, 500w would be just fine.
The rest of the build looks very good.But you could get the Atx version of the board not teh m-Atx.
What benefits would this give me besides more expansion slots?
why not an unlocked i5 + OC, should beat locked i7 in <4 threads.
get 2Xram for 2channel
that zotac 970 is actually a short card, I'd get a normal size
I don't OC my stuff, personal preference and I'm going to buy another stick of 8GB after building that within 2 months :)
What's the diff between a short and normal sized card?
The main benefit are more expension slot ,the first expension slot frome the Atx version is an 1x , so you dont get any problems with large cpu coolers an the gpu. And the both cost the same.
I would stick witje the zotac it`s the best 970 at this price and also very cool and quiet.
What is your budget and what will you be using this PC for? That is the most important thing to know when deciding the quality of a build and essential to make suggestions.
Whatever you're doing though I'd strongly suggest an SSD. It will change your life (Yes really).
I'm a musician so I use my computer for recording which involves heavy ram/cpu usage which is why I'll be adding another 8GB stick in the future and I do a lot of HD multicam video editing as well hence the GPU as well as a bit of gaming here and there.
I strictly don't OC and stick to nVidia/Intel.
I've considered an SSD but I think it'll just make my life difficult considering my music programs amount to around 250GB. Would it really be that much faster if the SSD had JUST the OS on it and NOTHING else?
Well you could get a larger SSD. They aren't too expensive now and put the OS and your music programs on it. Or you could just get a smaller one for the OS and a few programs and a HDD.
But yes. It really makes that much of a difference. A standard 1TB HDD (7200 RPM) that is about three quarters full that is operating as a boot drive will give you start up times somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:30+ on a good day. An SSD will be ~10-15 seconds. Overall the system will be much more responsive as well. From opening Control Panel, performing searches (as search data is saved on the OS disk regardless of what disk the file is located on) and just general use is much much much better.
If you do load your programs onto it as well they will start up amazingly fast too. Prob in 75% less time. It is IMO essential to have an SSD nowadays. It is one of those things that you really notice. Like going from 56K dial up to even crappy broadband.