Need some help

Ok, I'm building my first gaming PC. Been looking up stuff for a while now, benchmarking, etc. Anyways, I want to share my specs with you for my PC that I am building. I'm pretty sure everything is spick and span I just want to know your guy's opinions/ suggestions on my rig. Here are the specs:

  • CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition
  • Motherboard: ASRock 970 EXTREME3 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
  • RAM: Patriot Gamer 2 Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
  • Power Supply: XFX 550W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V 
  • GPU: HIS Radeon 7870 IceQ
  • HDD: WD Caviar Blue 500GB 7200 RPM

There are the specs, I'm pretty new to the PC game so please, any suggestions/ tips will be greatly appreciated!

Yup all really nice.

One thing that I would reccomend in the future is get a ssd and use that as a boot drive and also upgrade the phenom to a 8350

Also I dont know the exact spec of the 7870 but make shure the psu can handle it 

Hope it helped !

Thank you for your reply. I have looked at the specs of the GPU and I'm thinking of bumping my 550W PSU to a 600W because the GPU does have a minimum of 500W. Is this nessecary? Or should I still stick with the 550W PSU?

No need good sir, the 550 is plenty for your system. 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5691/the-retail-radeon-hd-7870-review-his-7870-iceq-turbo-powercolor-pcs-hd7870/4 Here is a power consumption test, it pulls around 340watts with a OC 3960X and a 7870. You are well within the safe zone with a 550 watt psu, even have some room for a bigger card if you wish as well.

looks good, I would recomend getting a bigger harddrive before getting an ssd. for gameing ( I assume your useing steam) you need alot of harddrive space for games.

an ssd will make your computer faster for booting windows and whatever games you have on it, but it will not affect your game after the inital load.  also, just about every ssd is more expencive than a TB of harddrive space.  either keep the monney you save or use it for a better card. 

good luck