RangerE51

Great help here and I really appreciate it. The reason I went with the 2x560Ti was more from an availability standpoint. I don't need it just yet though since I'm still in Afghanistan and have a month or so to wait and see how things pan out. I say that because of the IB release coming up. My hope is that it drives prices down. With that said I just started wondering what everyone thought of used parts? I'm all about squeezing blood from a penny and saving money! What are good things to get used and what isn't? I assume with people salivating over IB that there could potentially be a deluge of used parts that come up. Below is my new and improved build. Did some tweaking and wow it does look very familiar doesn't it? Should have just stayed with my original GTX560 plan! Processor Intel i5-2500K $204.99 Motherboard ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 (Open Box) $154.99 Graphics Card EVGA SuperClocked+ GeForce GTX 680 $534.99 Memory G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) $46.99 SSD Crucial M4 128GB SATA III $160.99 Hard Drive Seagate Barracuda Green ST1500DL003 1.5TB $94.99 Optical Drive LITE-ON DVD Burner - 24X DVD+R $17.99 CPU Cooler COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 EVO $34.99 Case COOLER MASTER HAF 932 Advanced $139.99 PSU CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX750 V2 750W $104.99 Total Rebate Total $1,495.90 $1,483.90

More great suggestions. The funny thing is that some of these you had on there I was already going to do but had changed things around due to price or my thoughts on what the benchmarks would look like. Specifically I was originally going to go with a HAF 932 Advance due to the airflow but had read that the 300 is still good. I was leary on that due to knowing I wasn't going to water cool and would need good airflow if I was going to OC to the speeds I hoped for. I also had originally planned for a EVGA GTX680 to be honest and only pulled back on it because I thought that two GTX560Ti's in SLI could beat it in benchmarks. I just haven't seen any good tests that show that, got my information from reading here and there. I have taken quite a bit from what you said and already changed the build around again, most noticeably with the RAM, GPU, optical, and case. Still researching the others too. Thanks a lot.

As a matter of fact I did want to do some overclocking. I was looking at getting the 460Ti to around 900/1200 which I have read isn't overclocking it to bad. I also wanted to overclock the I5-2500K to around 4GHZ when it was all said and done. I do want to stay with air cooling though, if that limits my overclocking I'm alright with that. Thats the biggest thing that I really don't know all that much about. The good news is Google knows everything, has all the answers to my questions! Of course I would also ask here to the experts. Your ideas on PSUs are great since I want to get one that I can grow with and there are no issues later down the road other than normal wear and tear.

My goal with this build is to see how good I can get with a low price point. While the total price is sitting at 1483.89USD, I am not holding it at that. If there is something better that is cheaper all the much better, but if there is something that is significantly better than I have listed I'm all ears. I would use this rig as an almost exclusively gaming machine. Playing Battlefield 3 and World of Tanks. With that said here's the build... Processor Intel i5-2500K $204.99 Motherboard ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 (Open Box) $154.99 Graphics Card EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti - 448 Cores Classified Ultra 1280MB $279.99 Graphics Card EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti - 448 Cores Classified Ultra 1280MB $279.99 Memory G-Skill Ripjaws Series 16GB $89.99 SSD Crucial M4 128GB SATA III $160.99 Hard Drive Seagate Barracuda Green ST1500DL003 1.5TB $94.99 Optical Drive LG 22X Super-Multi DVD Burner 22X DVD+R $17.99 CPU Cooler COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus $29.99 Case Antec Three Hundred Black Steel ATX Case $59.99 PSU Antec HCG-750 750W $109.99 Total $1483.89 My biggest concern with this build is the PSU I have picked not taking the load the 560Ti's will push. I picked it because I wanted to move to a GTX680 or beyond down the road, perhaps when we hit the "toc" cycle. "Down the road" to me means in three to four years. Something better will of course be out then but with the power consumption reviews I have seen on the GTX680 it looks promising. All advice on it would be greatly appreciated.