Greetings and salutations!
I've been deliberating over whether to build a PC for years and this year, after many hours spent window-shopping on PCPartPicker, I decided to finally get started. Over the next couple of months I will be buying one or two pieces of the build at a time in order to ease the pain on my wallet.
Actually, that's not entirely accurate as I already have a few pieces but only now decided to share this build with you guys. So without further ado I will run down the parts list, give you my rationale for the build and share how far I have come so far.
Parts
CPU: Intel Core i7 6700 k
Motherboard: Asus Maximus VIII Ranger
GPU: nVidia GeForce GTX 1080 (probably the MSI or Zotac variants when they are released. Also, I have a 980 Ti in the PC Part Picker list as a place holder.)
Case: Fractal Design Arc Midi R2
CPU cooler: Corsair H115i
PSU: EVGA SuperNova 650w 80+ Gold
Storage: Cruxial BX200 240gb ssd and WD Black 1TB HDD
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 2166mhz DDR4
Monitor: ASUS PB278QR (1440P IPS)
Wireless card: Whatever is reliable and cheap, probably some TP Link PCIe card.
Rationale
The idea behind this build is to have a PC that will be able to play most games at native res at 60 FPS for around 2 years before having to consider upgrading the GPU. To that end, I went for a 1440p monitor which is way easier to drive than 4K, especially with a GTX 1080. With 1440p, there's still headroom in terms of performance and I won't have to worry too much about having to compromise fidelity for performance in future games.
I also want to get my foot in the door with Overclocking. An H115i will hopefully allow me to push that 6700k up to 4.4/4.5 ghz without having to increase voltage too much, if at all. This is providing, of course that I don't get shafted by the silicon lottery. Moreover, the supposed overclocking headroom of the 1080, even on air cooling, makes me excited for the possibilities, especially considering that I avoided water cooling the GPU in order to be free to upgrade it as and when I desire.
The other parts are really just parts that I know are solid but don't cost the earth. Now, you may be wondering why I went for LPX RAM, well in truth it was because this was the cheapest non-value RAM that I could find on PC Part Picker at the time. I avoided value RAM because I really don't want to risk RAM errors with my first build. Not that value RAM always craps-out but in this area I didn't want to skimp.
Progress so far
To date I have three parts of the build: the case, the RAM and the Storage. There's an interesting story around the case though that you may want to hear. I ordered the case from eBuyer, not realising that it was the solid side panel version with the extra 140mm fan mount. When it arrived I obviously realised my mistake. Cue several weeks of internal debate over what to do. I really didn't want to send it back and I wondered if I could mod it: cut a space in the side panel for a window and glue some acrylic on the inside and create my own window, all while keeping that fan mount. In the end, I decided to check and see if Fractal had a spare parts department, maybe I could just order a new side panel with the window. Lo and behold they do have a spare parts store! That is always a great thing to see from a manufacturing company, that they provide spares of any and every part for every case is just great customer service. So the long and short of it is that I now have a case with a windowed side panel :)
See you in a few weeks for what should be a pretty big update!
PS. If anyone in the UK needs a spare Arc Midi R2 side panel, hit me up.