spent a while trying to pick parts and this is what i came up with. saw a video recommending these parts and i just added some stuff and changed the case. i'm thinking of switching to an AMD to cut the price down a bit. let me know what you all think!
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/yb0f
p.s. i still need a mouse and sadly a wifi card (too far for wired -.-) so if anyone can recommend some good ones that'll be awesome.
I think AMD might be a good for their Vishera/Piledriver FX lineup. Logan just released a video on the 8350 and the conclusion is that it's a formidable gaming CPU, and bested the Core i5 3570k, Core i7 3770k, and 3820 in some titles. It was particular surprising that the FX did better on Metro 2033 as that game in known to not scale well at all past 2 cores, and Intel's single-threaded performance is suppose to be much better than AMD's offerings.
Also, unless you know you are playing games that perform better on the 660, AMD might also the better route for GPU's as well. The AMD 7800 series dominated the Best Gaming GPU's For The Money this month for that price range at Tom's. I saw some 7870's for the same price as that 660 you're considering ($230 - $20 MIR).
The rig you have is Great and i have a UD3H and its Awesome For OC'ing
The 3570K beats the Fx Cpus at gaiming pretty much all the time, Logans Benchmarks Were GPU bottleneck so what you find pertains more towards the Graphics card and Motherboard/Ram layout (Pertaning to bandwidth) more so than a CPU at 40-60% load, when tested to cause the CPU to Bottleneck a game the intel is a clear winner. i Agree with Jerm on an AMD GPU, the value of them is just amazing and driver updates keep maiing them even better!
here are some benches showing said results.
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/AMD-FX-8350-Vishera-8Core-CPU-Review/?page=8
http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-reviewed/8
All of Logan's benchmarks had [u]the same GPU bottleneck[/u], and creating an environment where the GPU isn't loaded is completely unrealistic, and I'd argue irrelevant when gaming because most all games are going to put a load on the GPU. If the AMD FX behaves better when the GPU is under load, then I'd argue that makes the FX a better gaming CPU. So, unless you plan on playing games on their lowest settings, a lot of those other CPU benches are largely synthetic.
Also, if the OP does get an AMD 7870, he will have the same GPU bottleneck as Logan did in his testing. Just food for thought.