note: this is stage 1 of a long game build, all the core hardware has been purchased, but the secondary hardware (monitors and HDD's) will be replaced sometime down the road, likely Q2 2013, as summer sales hit, with a new CPU as soon as AMD figures out that clock speed is not the end all be all, and adds in some more IPC to those deliciously tempting eight cores.
for the MoBo, I grabbed a ASUS M5A97 revision 2, with USB 3.0 support, to me its worth the extra $10.
the GPU is a Sapphire HD 7870 GHZ edition, running at 1050 Mhz stock.
the RAM is an 2X8 kit of Mushkin enhanced blackline, CAS of 9 and 1600 Mhz stock.
the CPU is (currently) a Phenom X4 965 Black edition, stock speed of 3.4 Ghz, needless to say that will change very quickly.
Facilitating the steep OC this rig is gonna be getting is a Thermaltake Frio OCK, a brick of a cooler that will be filling most of my case, which is a Rosewill Blackhawk. purchased because of the top SATA port, and massive amount of mesh for airflow.
the PSU is really the crown gem, under the worst case scenario, the seasonic X750 gold, full modular PSU I got during an end of the world sale for $100 off self price; still provides around 20-15 watts of headroom, that's with the RAM, CPU and GPU OC'd, and peaked.
you'll notice the lack of hard drives, and optical drives... well, I have two 250 gig drives that I'm gonna use, and another 150 that I keep my Linux on, my current build is gonna get a *OLD* 60 gig disk and PFsense for an OS, assuming I can remember where I stuffed my stack of NICs...
And lastly- I don't use physical media, I have an external disk drive for the OS and my old games. so the 5.25 slots are gonna remain forever unpopulated.