Maximum PC

• NZXT Phantom PHAN-001RD Red Steel / Plastic ATX Full Tower Computer Case
• ASUS P8P67 PRO (REV 3.1) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
• CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-850TX 850W ATX12V v2.2 / EPS12V v2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply
• Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80623I72600K
• CORSAIR XMS 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMX8GX3M2A1600C9
• Western Digital Caviar Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
• SAMSUNG CD/DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-222AB
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit
• COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus RR-B10-212P-G1 "Heatpipe Direct Contact" Long Life Sleeve 120mm CPU Cooler Compatible Intel Core i5 & Intel Core i7

Total cost of the components: $1,112.91 minus probably about $50 in rebates (mail-in rebate cards)

Video card: want to scavenge from the old system-1GB Radeon 5770
Sound card: want to scavenge from the old system-Sound Blaster Live!

Let me know what you think if you feel I'm not ambitious enough. I feel the video card I will scavenge from the old system is average at best, but I wanted to give it a try to see how I like the frame rates. I can always upgrade the video card later, once the system is complete and running well.

I want to play MS Flight Simulator X, Shogun Total War/Empire Total War and the latest first person shooters such as ArMA 3, Crysis 2, etc....

This is my first ever self-build.

Oh, by the way, one more thing. When I get the antistatic bracelet, what do I attach myself to? The metal part of the case?

1. Good looking case.

2. Upgrade to the Z68 chipset, its newer, same price as the P67, and offers a few new features.

3. Good PSU, I'd look at the OCZ 850w 80+gold for $80AR @ us.ncix.com, but the corsair is a decent value at newegg for $115.

4. If you just plan to game, pick the cheaper i5 2500k to save a few bucks. You won't noticed the difference with HT.

5. Good ram

6. Get the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB 7200rpm drive for $60 @newegg. Very fast for a mechanical hard drive and a good choice for your master boot record. You can suppliment storage with a cheap 2tb green drive for about $60ish if you need the added space. With the Z68, you can add a small cheap SSD as your SRT drive to help boost system read speeds.

7. good choice on cpu cooler.

8. The 5770 is a bit low powered to run most games in high settings at 1080p, but you can always pick another cheap used one to add in CF for like $80. Although, one should still do fine in a new system. If you have the budget to upgrade, do so. lots of option in the 100-200 price range that won't break the bank. 6950's have been seen in the $200 range that's a great value.

9. Don't bother with a 10+yr old sound blaster live. On board audio is more than enough in current system and I don't believe there's updated driver support for win7 anyhow. If you insist on having a sound card in your system, Look at the cheap Asus Xonar or the Creative X-Fi.

10. Yes, you attach the anti-static bracelet to any bare metal that is exposed. If it's painted, it may not ground you. That being said, only people working in IT or clean room environments should worry about static discharge. For home use, just touch bare metal before you work on parts and make sure you don't wear fleece, wool or work in bare socks. lol

Thank you, JBaz, I will implement your suggestions but I think I will keep the CPU even though it's somewhat more expensive. Maybe I will get a video better card and I will try onboard audio for now.

By the way, to take advantage of the 1080p settings I will need a completely new display system, unlike any cheap monitor I've owned before. Some of those monitors are like 1 grand. I think PC Magazine recommended a Dell display in the $200 range.

How do you use your solid state drive? Did you put the operating system on it to speed up boot times? I never owned a SSD, and only recently I started seeing articles about them.

The 2500k and the 2600k is basically the exact same CPU, just the 2600k has HT, which is only useful in apps that take advantage of more than 4 cores, which is only content creation software like PS, CAD, CGI and video editing. Modern games barely take advantage of a dual core, much less a regular quad core. Save the 100 bucks and invest it towards a meaner gpu or an ssd; unless you want a little speed boost in those apps. The $130 difference between the 2500k and the 2600k is a big difference even though $315 isn't that much money to spend on a very powerful cpu compared to the last gen.

In terms of a nice 1080p display, asus makes some nice cheap 20-24" montiors that you should look at. I honestly not sure when one to recommend since they make a shit ton, but you can find a nice 23.6" asus for less than $200. I have a set of three dell ips monitors that I've used since 2008.

With an SSD and z68, you can add upto a 64gb ssd drive to be the SRT (smart response technology) drive which turns the ssd into an ssd cache drive; putting the most used files automatically on the ssd to improve read speeds which in turns improve your most used applications being launched almost instantly with your OS boot time being fast, while retaining your mechanical hard drive as your main boot record. It's a cheap way to gain the ssd speed with out spending $texas.

Otherwise, you can spend $100-200ish for a nice 64-120gb ssd to make as your dedicated boot disk. Works like any other hard disk drive. If you do decided to get an SSD, I'd say invest in the latest gen sataIII ssd that shoots for 500+ read/write speeds with high I/O. They are finally getting down in price over the last few months and hopefully they will reach the $1/gig mark by black friday (for the newer gen ssd, not the slower old gen stuff).

Here's my updated build. I'm getting my first ever internal SSD drive. I will put Windows on it and see how I like the experience. I've been watching YouTube videos showing wickedly fast boot times.

I will be trying SLI video cards in the near future so I made sure the motherboard and the power supply were certified for SLI.

NZXT Phantom PHAN-001RD Red Steel / Plastic ATX Full Tower Computer Case
$139.99
GIGABYTE GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
$123.99
EVGA 012-P3-1571-KR GeForce GTX 570 HD w/Display-Port (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card
$319.99
CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-850TX 850W ATX12V v2.2 / EPS12V v2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply
$134.99
Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80623I52500K
$219.99
CORSAIR XMS 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMX8GX3M2A1600C9
$56.99
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
$59.99
Crucial M4 CT064M4SSD2 2.5" 64GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
$104.99
SAMSUNG CD/DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-222AB
$16.99
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit
$99.99
COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus RR-B10-212P-G1 "Heatpipe Direct Contact" Long Life Sleeve 120mm CPU Cooler Compatible Intel Core i5 & Intel Core i7
$26.99

Subtotal: $1,304.89

Looks good enough for Crysis 2, LOL.

Nose, niece, struggling to fine the right word, NICE!

The only thing I'd change is to shop around for the graphics card and ssd. For 320, I'd look at the 6970 for the same price, or go with the a cheaper 6950 and unlock it to the 6970 for a 100 less. The 570 at that price point is lack luster compared to the alternatives. 2 460's in SLI will beat it easily for only 200ish, but that would limit your upgrade path.

The 560ti is a great card for the price, not as fast as the 570 obviously, but its pretty close for only 210-230 each. Pick one up now and wait till another one goes on sale for like $100.

The M4 is a decent modern ssd, but honestly, I'd look at the newer corsair series 3 drives that are much faster and about or less $/gb. newegg had the 120gb on sale 1-2 weeks ago for 136 that was a smoking deal. Plus the ocz vortex 3's are coming down in price. If you are going to make your boot drive an ssd, I'd look at 100+gb of storage, win7 takes what 10-20gb?

If you use 64gb ssd or less, it makes more sense to turn it into an SRT drive with your z68 chipset.

Thanks for your input man, you deserve an honorable mention for guiding me through this build.

OK, I will go ahead and skip the SSD for now until I have the system configured and running from the hard disk. I can always add it later, but first I have to research how that SRT technology works and what needs to be done to the motherboard to cache those frequently used files on the SSD.

I'm worried that if I buy the cheaper 560ti card it might be obsolete very quickly even if it saves me $100 now.

I realize there is the SLI option for the 560ti, as you can see I picked the power supply and the motherboard to have dual video cards in the future.

However, SLI is still a new idea for me and I don't know a whole lot about it. I heard only few games are programmed to take advantage of SLI. Pairing 2 obsolete video cards to double the video game performance seems too good to be true...

SLI has been around since 2005, all modern games can take advantage of it. It basically doubles your gpu power with very little performance hit unlike when they first came out. Crossfire for AMD works the same way, buts not as graceful in scaling as SLI, but its so damn close now that its a moot point, it wasn't a year or two ago, but AMD has been hard at work to make sure their CF is on par with SLI and it shows.

The 560ti is a very powerful budget card for 1/2 the price of the previous GTX 480 monster and it performs at about 80% of the 480. Not to shabby.

GTX 560 ti vs. GTX 480

In all regards, yes, every gpu on the market will become obsolete after a while, but you should expect 2-4 years of good use if you plan it out smartly and if you can be a person who doesn't have to be on the bleeding edge of technology to play games. You should be fine with one or two 560ti's for a while.

I agree with JB. I am running a 560Ti that I just got in May. I expect it will serve me well for sometime to come.

HEy I have that gigabye mobo brand new, I can hook you up with a deal, message me if you havent bought one yet!