I haven't built a pc since 2002, things were quite different then. I am primarily a lighting designer for theatre, but I have been getting more and more work projection designing. Editing for the projections is taking a toll on my 2011 Macbook Pro. Like most of you I love games and I want to be able to make them as pretty as possible. Take a look.

I will be putting in a 2TB Seagate Constellation drive I bought last year for media.

Would you add or change anything?

Should I skip the water cooling until I know I will overclock?

Thanks

Just a couple of thoughts...look into the Noctua NH-D14 instead of the Corsair closed circuit water cooling units. There are some direct comparison on Toms and the Noctua easily wins. I have a Corsair H100 and it does the job, but if I had it to do over again I'd just get the Noctua.

You could also save $100 or so and go with a Corsair TX650 instead of that 760w...that's a good PSU but way, way overkill. You could get the TX650 and still run a pair of GTX 780's with no problem if you ever wanted to add a second card.

Another option would be to go with a high end i5 and save another $120+ and have no perceptible drop in performance from the i7.

Unless you plan on doing hardcore overclocking, water cooling isn't worth it. Furthermore a closed loop water cooler like the H80 is going to provide very little benefit over just getting a quality 30-40 dollar air cooler from somebody like Noctua, Zalman, or CoolerMaster.

500GB SSD is also fairly overkill, 256GB SSD is the sweet spot right now in my opinion, they are affordable and provide ample space to install all your main programs and a handful of games you might frequent or value fast loading on. You generally don't store media on an SSD so that much space just isn't needed in my opinion.

760w is also most certainly overkill, unless you plan going SLI or plugging in many hard drives at some point. 600w is likely plenty if you aren't planning on ever going crazy.

Assuming ~1800 is your budget and you don't have a mechanical keyboard and quality ips or 1440p monitor, I'd suggest cutting down around the above and sticking one of those in, just by themselves those both provide a sustainstantle bang for your buck compared to a closed loop water cooler, excessive ssd and psu.

That mobo is a nogo

Agreed with MB on all three points. NH-D14 is the best air cooling solution I've ever encountered first hand. It's a little unwieldy and can make accessing RAM slots kind of a pain if you want to upgrade down the line, but for a system that you want to build, put down, and not worry about, it makes the most sense to me and allows for overclocking down the line.

I'm not so sure about a pair of GTX 780's on 650W (I use http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine to estimate power draw because I've over/under estimated too many times) but on a single GTX 780 you should have enough wiggle room to run the system at 100% without worrying too much about your PSU's reliability @650W. I had a friend who was convinced by his other friends he'd need 1000W for a dual R9 290 rig. Now THAT was overkill.

As for i7 vs i5, there's no big reason to go i7 for gaming, but you might see wider gaps in things like rendering 4k video. I doubt if that applies to what you'll be doing at all, but you could probably find comparison benchmarks of that kind of thing if you're inclined.

A couple of side-notes that weren't touched; What are your thoughts on disc drives? Some people think I'm crazy for suggesting it, but I still think any desktop >1000$ might as well have a 20$ dvd player/burner tossed in. Of course, you can get around optical media if you want pretty easily... How about the case? How settled on the corsair case are you? I was recently looking at cases in that price range and preferred the fractal r4 series of cases. Obviously we're talking about preference at that point though.

Good luck and above all else have fun! Unless you're mister money pants, you don't get to build your own high end rig often.

Edit: mrcraggle pointed out the mobo, and indeed there seem to be some mixed opinions on it. Maybe consider the ASUS Z87-PLUS or MSI Z87-G45 . Those are my personal preferred mobo brands.

@mb: thanks for the tips. I will definitely drop down to the 650w. I thought the video editing would see a performance difference from the i7.

@exiledvip3r: I hoped editing video files from the SSD would show an improved response from Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I hadn't considered a new monitor, that will make a difference for sure. Thanks

@crona: Thanks for the Mobo recomendation. I go back and forth on the optical, I didn't realize they had gotten so cheap. Thanks

@sumjugei: aren't you going to be using the GPU for rendering?

@mb: I will use the GPU for renders, I've assumed that the CPU would also affect render and scrub speeds... I'll go look into it more. Thanks again

I don't know much about Premiere, but with Avid systems the CPU does most of the work - regardless of your GPU. Even when Avid claims that it plays nicely with your GPU, you can monitor usage in the background and see that it still relies on your processor for the most part. If you do serious video work, get the i7.

Don't forget about your thermal paste. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835100008

@sumjugei Just a price suggestion for the memory if you are getting 2 x 8GB, there's a whole lot more cheaper options out there and you can probably save around $50-70 for some good memory. There are also good prices for the various Crucial sticks as well.

Btw, @crona did you mean to say, "there's no big reason to go i7 for gaming" instead of i5? Just checking!

@bboys2231: that would ruin my weekend. Luckily, I've ordered that already

@gaspower You caught me ;) Consider it edited - it was a late night for me!

In terms of thermal paste, if you go for the noctua, spending more on thermal paste may have been over kill. It's my understanding that the included noctua thermal paste is actually really good. No harm in spending for a step up though, I suppose.

I'd keep the bigger power supply. The power supply and case are two things that will travel through your builds.

You left out the price of an OS. (Unless you're already providing one.)

And, you left out case fans. I'm rather fond of the NF-P12-1300. But filling your case with those is going to be an extra $200. The 500 comes with some fans, but I always find fans that are included with cases are either too noisy or have crappy bearings.

good build :D

@zelyre: I hadn't planned to buy additional fans... The power should pull on the bottom, the front case fan should pull in the front. The back case fan should push, but will maintain positive pressure inside the case because it wont outpace the other two.

I think it is something I will wait on to either see if it is a problem or until I do a round of upgrades.

I have a windows 8 license I am carrying over to the new machine.

Yeah, the occasional mix-up happens to me as well! :D

BTW @sumjugei have you settled with your components or are you still looking?

I am currently digesting the responses here and on a couple other forums. Trying to decide what to do with conflicting information and being a little over budget.

Other sites have recommended to double down on water cooling with the H100, jumping up to the GTX780 Ti, and jumping to a socket 2011.

We have consensus that a 650w would be enough, the "mobo is a no go" and that I should think about getting a 1440p ips monitor

Water cooling is non essential (for overclocking) provided you aren't in an un-airconditioned hot climate. I'm running a non watercooled setup and I've got 2plus ghz on the cpu and am able to overclock a gtx 690 pretty much as far as it's going to go. You can overlock well enough on air and with good case air flow. I'm not familiar with the case so it might mean buying a couple of decent fans to replace the stock ones, so factor that in for your costs. I've read that watercooling can be as noisy/noisier once you start pushing it anyway.

What's the incentive for going for the 2011 socket?

The socket 2011 comes from After Effects being CPU intensive. While many video editing programs do a good job of using the GPU, After Effects lags behind. SO the throughput and additional cores would help After Effects, but very much disrupts my budget or all the other components.

This might be an overload of information... but there's a big comparison sheet from anandtech for different coolers here. You can compare various cooling options that people are suggesting and make a choice afterwards. Obviously, you can spend more and get better cooling if you go liquid but you run the risk of a leak and you have to mount the radiator inside the case (not usually a problem with corsairs).

How important is overclocking to you? If not at all, go with the stock cooler and if you run into serious heat issues, RMA your CPU (haswell processors tend to run hot due to less than stellar manufacturing). If overclocking is interesting but not an immediate concern, go with the noctua. Your only concern with the noctua will be the space it takes up. If overclocking is a necessity, or you just don't want a big honkin' cooler, go for an h100i or similar closed loop liquid cooling option. It's a difference of ~40$ from what I can see on newegg, which is not worth the extra performance in my opinion. I've overclocked my sandy bridge 2600k processor to 4.7GHz comfortably and stopped even thinking about heat because it was so low.

I really don't know the intricacies of socket 2011 vs 1150 so keep that in mind but... Your reasoning is throughput and extra cores. You're looking at $600 for a step up to 6 cores. That's double the allotted amount you put down for a CPU. Let's say you reel that price in and buy a $300 processor, you're looking at the 4820k. Let's compare its performance here and here to the 4770k. The 4820k actually scores lower in some cases, barely higher in others. If text could convey sound, this paragraph would sound like "meh..."

People will recommend expensive options. The 780ti is an expensive option. If you're gaming in 1440p and want everything maxed out and running at 60fps, then sure, but keep in mind that comes with the caveat of "it won't for more than a year." I recently recommended an r9 290 for a friend's build. It's about the same price as the GTX 780, about the same performance. (EDIT: Here's a comparison between the 780, 780ti, 290, 290x in real world performance.) The reason I recommended it is because:

1. They can be soft modded essentially into r9 290x cards free (not sure if this loophole is still open)

2. It's always been my understanding that crossfire scales better than SLI (i.e. You'll get a higher percentage of performance boost by adding a second card on crossfire than SLI)

3. An r9 290 can still run 60fps @1440p on almost any game with the AA turned down a little.

In other words, you can upgrade when you actually need it. Obviously this also comes with all the problems dual GPU setups come with, but hey, everything comes with pros and cons.

As for 1440p... I got some korean monitors at that resolution on the cheap. I'd do it again in a second if I had to choose again. they're about $350 but depending on who you buy from, they're allowed to have 1-3 dead pixels. Alternatively you can pay $600-800 for a name brand and they're guaranteed dead-pixel free. If you don't end up buying one, I don't think you need to worry about getting a 780ti or dual gpu for that matter.

@crona: @sumjugei: Since your main production platform is After Effects, you are definitely correct in that it is CPU intensive. However, there are some functions in AE that are greatly accelerated with Nvidia/CUDA cards and will receive no benefit from an AMD/OpenCL card. I suggest reading up on some Adobe technical documents or dev forums to find out exactly what is supported and by which module and seeing if you need to make your video card choice accordingly.

If you do decide to go with Nvidia, make sure you choose at least a GTX 780 and not a 770. 770's are CUDA Compute Capability 3.0, 780's are 3.5. Plus there is the whole vram consideration, more is better if you intend to use the card's parallel processing capabilities, and it certainly can't hurt in terms of game performance either.

A final suggestion...you may want to go with even more RAM than 16gb. I know it sounds crazy, and if we were talking about a system you were building primarily for gaming, then it would be. However, this is a special case scenario and After Effects can utilize individual cores to render in the background if there is enough RAM to allocate to the task. I believe it's +2gb per core in addition to whatever memory is already being utilized by Windows and whatever applications you're running. While will most likely be fine with 16gb, you may want to consider upping that to 24 or 32. In this case, 8gb isn't enough and 16gb isn't necessarily overkill.

Keep us updated on the build!

I guess 780/780ti is the way to go on GPU's then!

Thanks to everyone who helped out with their suggestions and comments. I have a new machine and so far it is working well. It has been nice experiencing things like stable frame rates, AA and AO. Now I'm back off to my back catalog....

The Define cases are dope. I have the mini one and it is amazing. They keep things nice and quiet and they aren't all flashy like so many other cases.