Wow thanks a ton for the huge wall of text jasonlylevene. Was insanely helpful. You should be able to see your influence in the parts I picked haha. ^___^
As far as holding off for the newest and greatest hardware...gah I feel like I've been doing that for years (mostly cuz I was too broke to buy anything).
Here's my current system:
MB: P5K3 Deluxe
Proc: Intel Core 2 Quad CPU @ 2.4ghz
Memory: 2x ddr3-1600 2gb 9-9-9-24 and 2x ddr3-1333 1gb 9-9-9-24 Windows says ram is running at 1066mhz, I guess that's the compatible speed of the 2 types of chips and the MB?
Video: Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 4gb
Monitor: Some very old flat panel (4" thick?) 40" Samsung 1080p
OS: Windows 8.1 Pro 64bit (DirectX 11)
I read your response a bit late Cespenar. Already "built" my rig (picked out parts on newegg) and decided against water cooling. WC just seems like a lot of work vs air and not really worth it. At least it did till I read your post. I was so into phase cooling (sub-ambient) that I decided either phase or uber easy I guess (so closed loop wc or just air).
This is what I came up with
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=27361266
Please let me know if I overlooked something: will have some kind of bottleneck, really skimped, went way overboard on some aspect, am missing some required obvious part (