Okay, first, I'll preface with why I'm building, shamelessly copied from my Rants post which got sidetracked into some other stuff.
My thing is, I still do incremental upgrades, and I build to plan on doing so.
Thus, not only is it important that I know exactly what's in my computer (though, the boutique builders have gotten much better about this than the big builders of 10 years ago were), but also, the warranty isn't really of benefit, since I plan on cracking it and doing my own maintenance and upgrades anyways. Is it a bit more hassle? Yeah, but more often than not, it's something minor and quick, so the headache of worrying about it is made up for by the speed of a 15 minute diagnosis and on-site repair and getting on with my life.
In addition, I find the process is good for me, professionally, as it keeps me sharp and up to date on the tech. I tend to mostly tune out all the nitty gritty hardware news when I'm not shopping, because it tends to burn a hole in my pocket. So tuning in, as it were, for a month or two every couple years keeps me relevant.
Finally, I get MS software for free via MSDNAA through my job. So I'm not even paying OEM prices, and I'm not getting shovelware demo bundles that I have to strip off.
So, with that as a disclaimer (namely, that it might not translate to a worthwhile savings vs. benefit analysis for somebody else, either being more expensive than building without my access to software, or without the intention on doing upgrades or self-repairing), I'll give you guys an idea what I'm buying. I won't bother listing prices, as they're gonna change two weeks from now, or whatever. But as a value discussion, this ought to remain relevant for a few months.
I started off with a Core i7 2600K. I could have opted for the i5 2500K, which is likewise unlocked and similarly speedy (the 2600K is clocked at 3.4GHz), but the i7 has hyperthreading, allowing the 4 cores to run 8 threads in advantageous circumstances. The way hyperthreading works is each core can run the same operation on two sets of data at the same time. Thus, when you have lots of parallel processing that's not self-referential (that is, the inputs of operation B don't rely on the outputs of A), you can approach twice the throughput. Good for media encoding/decoding, encryption/decryption, and can be taken advantage by cunning game coders for some operations. The thing hyperthreading doesn't help with (directly, at least) is raw multitasking. But it's still a quad-core processor behind the hyperthreading, so I'm not worried.
The i7 2600K is a Sandy Bridge generation CPU, which uses LGA 1155. Pretty much, your options for motherboard northbridges are z68, p65, and .. I forget the third one. I opted for z68, the most recent introduction to the market, because I want to try out a shiny new technology Intel came up with called SRT. It's a system where the chipset can be instructed to use up to 80 (I think? Or 64?) gigs of a drive as a dynamic cache for the rest of the hard drive accesses. The idea is that, if you're not made of money to buy enough SSD storage to just run off of, but you don't want to manually manage a hybrid SSD/HDD system to put the worthwhile files on an affordable consumer SSD, while using the HDD for data files and such that won't be of real benefit on the SSD, you can use SRT. SRT will get to use a small SSD drive as a big-ass cache for reads and writes to the HDDs. And it's supposed to be smart enough to skip caching bulky data that's infrequently read, and instead focus on caching things that you frequently have to read, like files used to load commonly used applications. It's a neat idea, and so far, it's been reviewed fairly well.
Since there's one thing I hate about home computers, and that's fiddling and tweaking on a regular basis (I like to set it up once, and then just use it, with necessary maintenance like dust removal etc. done periodically but grudgingly), I figure this tech is built for me. So I chose the z68 chipset, and have ordered up a Gigabyte GA Z68XP-UD3-iSSD motherboard. The iSSD model differs from the non-iSSD model of the otherwise same name in that it's got an Intel 311 series 20GB SLC SSD drive in the mSATA form factor (which is basically the bare SSD component, without the 3.5" or 2.5" profile casing) bundled with it, snuggled into a slot right on the motherboard. The sister board reviewed well at the usual suspects, and the pricing of the bundle saves me about $40 at the time of this writing vs. buying one of Intel's 311 SLC drives separately.
To provide the actual storage, I've got 2 1TB Seagate Barracudas, which I plan to mirror. Oddly enough, as a non-pirate, I'm not really a storage hog (though, I do enjoy the luxury of leaving lots of games installed rather than constantly installing/uninstalling them), so I don't mind RAIDing smaller drives (*boggle* Since when did 1TB become "smaller drives?" Apparently, since 3TB's came out, or something) to give me some peace of mind. I'm opting for a simple RAID 1 mirror instead of the 4-drive RAID 10 I'm currently using because it's about the same cost vs. going with 4x 500's, and the SSD has to use up one of the 4 3.0Gb/s SATA channels. I could do a 3-drive RAID 5, but that's kind of pointless, as it's no more redundant than a 2-drive RAID 1 -- in either case, 2 failures kills the volume. The 3-drive RAID 5 might strictly be faster on sustained reads, but I'm building for random read/write with the caching, and the mirror should do better there.
I've got 16 gigs of DDR3 1600 in a 4x 4GB matched set from Kingston. The set I found have some attractive heat spreaders, yadda yadda, not like I plan on pushing crazy O/C. 4GB sticks seemed like the sweet spot; 6's and 8's are exorbitant in comparison.
Khross was raving about his SeaSonic X750 Gold 750W PSU, so I was happy to take his recommendation, since I don't follow PSU branding/rebranding etc. It's modular, and apparently built like a brick house.
I decided, "Ah, what the hell," and sprung for a BD-burner. As I said, I'm not a storage hog, but I figure having the option is nice, and $80 for an LG with Lightscribe isn't outrageous.
For a case, I opted for a Silverstone Raven RV-02E, the revised second generation in their Raven gamer line of cases. It's got a funky design, and I find myself buying funky, potentially innovative designs just to check them out since I don't do a lot of case buying. (My last case is a Lian Li that mounts the motherboard on the "wrong" side, upside down, to put the PSU at the bottom in an effort to use the PSU's fans to kill the common dead zone at the rear bottom beneath the video card without stretching the power cables in unanticipated ways. It's a little funky, but seems to have served well) Anyways, this Raven case came across my radar when I was reading a review of quiet cases that a site did. They solicited case manufacturers to send them an entry for a 5-way head to head they were doing on silent cases. Silverstone sent the Raven, their gaming line, instead of one of their enterprise cases, and it surprised the reviewer by not placing last on noise and running very cool in their test group of silent cases. Anyways, Silverstone's signature is rotating the motherboard mount 90 degrees, so that the I/O ports face the top, and the case can mount intakes for a positive pressure setup at the bottom of the case, pulling air in the bottom and allowing convection to assist in drawing hot air up out the top, all while maintaining the front-to-back over the motherboard airflow that's expected by motherboard designers. It's a neat idea, and while I value quiet, I place it secondary to cooling because I tend to air cool with stock heatsinks (again -- this falls into tweaking I don't get any enjoyment out of fiddling with. Give me something stable and reliable, but fast).
Finally, I went back and forth on the video cards. I knew I wanted to SLI this build. I haven't done a two-GPU build since freaking 3dFX Voodoo 2 (or was it 3?) cards, and even then, I was young enough that I was operating more in an assisting capacity. So it's kind of a gap in my building experience, and it was in my budget. The question was more along the lines of "how in my budget was it?" Namely, should I SLI two 460's and plan on upgrading early in the next generation of releases, or grab 500's and stick with them a bit longer? I eventually opted for two 560's. I took them over the 560Ti's because I wanted to get more than a Gig of VRAM on each card, and to do so with the Ti's would price me out of my range pretty quickly. So I'm losing 1/8th of the Stream processor cores to get 4GB's total video RAM. I feel comfortable that that setup will serve me better when I replace my aging Dell 1920x1200 monitor with a nice 2560x1440/1600 display maybe next year. The RAM ought to future-proof my video card for AA on the ultra-high resolution then. The deal I found was for EVGA-brand factory overclocks (can you have a factory overclock when there's no actual reference board?) at 900Mhz.
TL;DR component list:
Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz
Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3-iSSD
16 GB Kingston DDR3 1600 (4x 4GB)
x2 EVGA SuperClocked 02G-P3-1469-KR GeForce GTX 560 (Fermi) 2GB
x2 Seagate SV35 Series ST31000526SV 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
LG Black Super Multi SATA WH12LS30
SeaSonic X750 Gold 750W
Silverstone Raven RV02B-EW
I'll let you guys know how it turns out. When I thought I was going to be building on Saturday, I was planning on taking some pictures and trying out Google+'s Photo Albums. Maybe I still will, if I feel patient enough with Deus Ex knocking on my doorstep.