ive been pretty lucky with my PC's the last one i had for like 5 years and this one has been about 5 years now too. hopefully the next one lasts just as long. i plan on using just a 970 like i said. with my win 7 ultimate. ill grab a i5 most likely. ill make sure i get the K though for sure. ill prolly just put 16gb ram and gonna get a big SSD. most likely 512 if they come down in price a bit.

I got a 1TB Samsung SSD for just under $500 which I thought was a decent deal. There are cheaper drives out there (e.g. Crucial), but I won't go budget on SSDs again.

One of the cooler changes I made this time around was go liquid cooling on the CPU with the Corsair h110. It's quieter, system runs cooler, and it just looks cleaner inside. Really happy with it so far.

What card/ram/cpu combo did you end up going with this time around?

I have been running those for my last few builds. I have a bad ass case and ditched the stock fans it comes with. When i took out the fans on the heatsink my noise dropped dramitcally. I have two 200 fans on top that is blowing in. When i took out the fans it did not affect temp at all.

Still running a GTX 980 that I got relatively recently. For the mobo/cpu, I went ASUS Maximus Hero VI and i7-4790. First time with Asus mobo. So far so good.

After the liquid cooler, my next favorite purchase was the NZXT H440 case. Built really well, really great cable management, good soundproofing, and just looks gorgeous. Like Gron, I ditched the stock fans and put in a bunch of Corsair AF140s. The whole thing is whisper quiet even while gaming.

Here are a bunch of pics of a rig with basically the same parts list as mine, minus the SLI:

https://pcpartpicker.com/b/qTsYcf

I am using NXKT Phantom. They make the best cases!

i like your case choice a lot after looking through a lot of cases yours looks ideal. also i was going to get a maximus mobo as well. just not gonna get a i7 no need for me.

One caveat of the NZXT H440 is there is no place to put an internal CD/DVD drive. I wasn't sure how I would install Windows w/o a dvd drive, but I ended up putting Windows on a USB stick and was shocked how much faster installation was. So it turned out to be a non-issue for me, and I suspect most gamers these days don't need a DVD drive, but it's something to consider. If you can get past that, it's really a fantastic case.

One thing to consider re: i5 vs i7... the CPU is actually becoming a factor with 4k video. If you don't plan on getting a Titan X or pushing 4k video, then don't worry about it. Otherwise, imho, it's worth spending the extra $100 or whatever to get an i7 to give yourself more options down the road.

considering everything still runs awesome on my first gen i5 ill prolly just stick with the new gen i5K series

you guys need "" to watch this

Intel SSD 750 is making SSD ( of the past few months ) look like soft bitchs (for consumers)

14:50 timestamp for graphs