New build: Futureproofed or overboard?

After shopping around all the "we'll build it for you" places, I've realized there's no way to get a good quality top-of-the-line PC without at least a 33% markup in price, which I'm just not willing to pay if I don't have to. And with the relative ease of building PCs these days, I really shouldn't have to. So I'll bite the bullet and build instead.

Next question: what parts? Been getting a ton of input from here on the forums and from friends at work, and given all that, I've decided my goal is to get a system that will last me another 6+ years like my current Dell Inspiron 8300 has, so the point that I've taken to heart is, "Front-load this bad boy with as much high-end stuff as you can."

So here's the current list o'stuff:

NewScrapper Gaming Rig

Questions I have at the moment:

1) Is the i7 2600K + Radeon 6970 overdoing it? I could go with the i5 2500K + Radeon 6950 instead.

2) Will I need more cooling "oomph" than the stock cooler that comes with the CPU? If not, a friend of mine offered me this cooler for the price of lunch.

3) Is the 650W power supply enough?

Feel free to point out any other problems you see. Thanks!

The components on your list look good. I think that power supply has the right connectors for the video card (the vid card needs a 6-pin and an 8-pin PCI-E connector).

I have the same power supply and almost the same motherboard. The PSU is big enough as long as you'll only have one video card. It says it can run two, but for for two of those cards I'd want more watts.

I think 6 years is an unreasonable expectation. Since you're talking about gaming, I think that it will take less than 6 years for you to become unhappy with the computer performance.

As for the cooler.... well, the Intel stock coolers are better than they used to be. They're good enough if you're not doing anything particularly strenuous. Running one instance of CoH on a quad core CPU is NOT strenuous. I run SETI@home plus Rosetta@home so my CPU is running all 4 cores at 100% utilization 24/7. I have this cooler. It's awfully tall so you need be sure a case is wide enough. I wanted a tall (rather than wide) cooler since my memory modules are kind of tall.

Edit: Oh, I don't think that Zalman cooler you link to is compatible with socket 1155. That's a pretty old model.

About the only other "strenuous" things I was thinking about putting on the new system was DC Universe Online or World of Warcraft. Would either of those rate a better cooler than stock?

I feel safe saying you will get more overall utility out of a larger SSD and dropping at least the CPU from the 2600 to the 2500 (k or not) and being able to stick more programs on the SSD as opposed to just the OS.

Put another way: Paying $110 extra on the CPU for .1 Ghz over the 2500 is not going to provide more performance than a SSD that's big enough to hold programs.

That said, I'd wait for the C400 and other second-gen SSDs that got announced a week or two ago. Buy the box now if you want and load on the HDD, then transfer to the SSD via reinstall later.

I'm fine with both dropping the i7 to the i5 (and correspondingly dropping the Radeon 6970 to the Radeon 6950 -- heard they're supposed to go hand in hand like that) and waiting on the SSD. Reason I was picking the i7 was a friend told me, "Sure, they aren't using the six-core for much now, but what about later?" Is the number of cores actually going to matter soon, either for CoH or the other games I listed?

looks good.

here are my concerns

the cases made by rosewill have problems with the i/o panels, causing random resets.

you will get better performance from a higher quality, lower latency ram at 4GB than 8GB of slower ram. also the ram you have chosen has a very tall heatsink, that will hit some of the larger CPU coolers

your PS is acceptable, but I would go up to at least a 750-800W if you plan on running a second graphics card in the future.

as far as the other components, I am a fan of comboing AMD processors and ATI cards, dont have much experience with the intel side pairing with ATI cards.

I guess it really all depends on what you are going to do with the system.

I am running a AMD phenom II 1090t black edition 3.2GHz OC'ed to 4GHz with 4GB of high speed corsair dominator GT ram, and a xfx radeon 5870 all mounted to an asus crosshair IV formula MB and I run the game with all settings maxed out, and have yet to experience any stutter or lag even while on a rikti ship raid

First your friend's heatsink won't work, it needs to be Socket 1156 compatible. Socket 1155 is compatible with Socket 1156 heat sinks BTW. If you are planning to OC, I would think a 3rd party heat sink is a must.

Case - I still prefer the Antec 300 Illusion but the Rosewell does come with an SSD adapter.

PSU - It's fine, a little on the low end if you are planning to OC the CPU.

Memory - Tall memory heat sinks may interfere with a 3rd party CPU cooler. Otherwise fine. Note that Intel now lists 1.55 volts as the maximum voltage for memory for Sandy Bridge CPUs.

Motherboard - Most notable thing about this is the lack of SLi and reasonable CrossFire support. No, I don't consider the 2nd PCIe x16 but what is actually a PCIe x4 slot reasonable CrossFireX support. But if you have no plans of ever doing either then it's fine.

Drives - Fine.

CPU - Personally I think the i7-2600K is overkill for gaming. It's not clocked that much faster (3%) than the much cheaper i5-2500K and while that and the extra 2MB of L3 cache will help, what you are paying for is Hyper Threading, which is of questionable usefulness for gaming but great for highly multithreaded applications like video compression and 3D rendering. (Run on sentence much?) Anandtech Bench comparison.

Video - If you can afford it sure. But double check if the board can fit in that case. The card is listed at 10.7" long at Diamond and power is along the top so that helps.

That's my 2 cents.

Well I started my reply before you changed your wishlist.

Video card length isn't a problem with the CM 690 II case. It can handle a video card up to 11.96" long.

That Cooler Master PSU isn't all that great. Check out the conclusions from the reviews at HardwareSecrets and JonnyGURU. As an alternative, the Antec TP-750 is currently $95 after rebate and is semi-modular.

Well with the adapter that CPU cooler should fit. But it was designed in the era of single core P4 and Athlon 64 CPUs. I don't know how much better, if at all, it will be over the stock Sandy Bridge cooler. You can always give it a try.

And while I'm not a fan of CrossFireX or SLi, my opinion isn't in the majority which is why my $1375 build is speced to handle a 2nd HD 6850 as well as overclocking the processor (another opinion I don't subscribe to) without needing to upgrade the PSU or improve the cooling of the case or CPU.

First off, looks good.

Second, there is no kill like overkill.

Third, there's no such thing as overkill. There's only "kill" with ever greater levels of surety.

Honestly, if it's in your budget and you don't have an issue with the price DO IT.

On stock cooling. Unless you're overclocking, I wouldn't worry too much about getting a third party cooler. The CM-690's, additionally, have plenty of room for additional 120mm fans. If you can't keep the system cool with between 2 and 5 120mm fans, you aren't keeping it cool PERIOD.

Again, overclocking is a different animal. Say so if you're planning for it.

If you're looking at using the recovered funds from the downgrades to go with an SSD primary drive, take a look at the 120-128GB disks. Those are easily in your price range now. Keep the Spinpoint drive for mass storage and swap space. Now you might be able to get away with a 64GB drive. I'm just always paranoid about running out of space on my main drive, so I like lots and lots (and lots and lots) of headroom.

Note that my current Win7 Ultimate install with only a couple apps (including Office and CoH) clocks in at about 36GB right now.

And you'll still see the tips on the load screens. Even with the monster throughput on my SSD RAID-0, I still have to sit and wait. Zone/map load times aren't totally dependent on disk throughput.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

According to my "sources", the ASUS motherboard comes with a button that you push to overclock the CPU. That's about as much technical overclocking work as I intend on doing, but it depends on how easy it is to go the software route. I just Googled up an article that says you can push a 2500K to as high as 4.8GHz, but I'd be satisfied with the advertised 3.7GHz if that meant not killing my CPU. (I have no clue what overclocking does to the life of a CPU. It just sounds bad. Darn gut feelings.) Other than that, I read about the G.SKILL memory that the memory may need to be tweaked to run at the full 1600MHz, as it might default to 1333MHz straight out of the package.

Quick question about CoH on an SSD: I've been told that whenever CoH does an update to my normal (non-SSD) hard drive, I should defrag my hard drive to make sure that all the files line up. What about with CoH on an SSD -- is the normal TRIM maintenance (which I assume happens regularly or is scheduled regularly) sufficient to take care of the update fragging factor?

Fragging isn't a problem for SSDs period. The purpose of defragging a conventional hard drive is reduce head seeks. The average seek time for mechanical hard drives are around 1/70th of a second, that's nearly the amount of time it would take to transfer 1.5MB of data so getting rid of extra ones is generally a good thing.

Okay, tossed in the Crucial 64GB SATA-III, which is all I'm willing to cough up for at this point. (For some reason NewEgg is selling the version that comes with copying software at a cheaper price than the standalone SSD.) With Windows 7 Home and CoH on there only, there should be plenty of room. Very, very close to pulling the trigger...just need to price check some other sites besides NewEgg to make sure I'm getting good deals all around.

Hey, in case anyone is interested, NewEgg has a Combo Deal running on the CPU and motherboard I've got on my list. It's $20 off and includes a copy of the game "Civilization V".

I checked out a bunch of articles on Agility vs. Vertex and they reported no real-world difference in performance between the two, so I'll go with the significantly cheaper Agility. Only 60GB of space -- 55GB after formatting -- but still plenty of room for Windows 7 and CoH if I've been reading everybody right. (I need to see if DC Universe Online has a trial edition out yet just to see if I'll even be interested in that -- might influence me to get a bigger SSD if the answer is yes. Aside from WoW, I don't know of any other programs of tremendous size I would need to run on it.)