I'll have pictures once the parts come in and I put it together.
Anyway, I went way, way, WAY overboard on this build.. but its for my birthday.. the big two one.. so what the hell. To put this in perspective, i've never, NEVER, EVER, owned the most expensive card at the time of purchase before.. normally i would get the low midline or a top of the line from several years prior off of ebay.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of this build was made with future proofing in mind.
ON TO THE PARTS :
Case: Thermaltake ArmorPlus
PSU: SeaSonic X750 Gold
CPU (already had awaiting this build): Core i7-860
Motherboard: MSI P55-GD85
RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 4GB
Graphics Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 480 (Fermi) SuperClocked
Input on each part:
Case: Absolutely everything i want in a case, completely. If it ever comes to the point for it, it has 10 expansion slots and room for extended ATX, aka i could go 4-way sli if i so choose several several years down the line.
PSU: I don't know how many of you know this, but Seasonic is the reason/company behind EVERY single world class PSU manufacturer. Corsair didn't just magically find out how to make amazing power supplies as well as memory out of nowhere. Neither did PC Power & Cooling, for that matter. These guys have been doing PSUs since the 80s, and constantly research new ways to improve on it.
THIS review sold me on this power supply, in case you're curious.
CPU: The best balance of power and price in the P55 architecture. (I liked the newer architecture that got rid of the north/south bridges)
Motherboard: USB 3.0, SATA III. What more do I need to say? Well, apparently the 1 touch OC actually works incredibly well. Also the pipes apparently can make your system run several C lower than otherwise. Also, MSI has just about as good as a reputation as ASUS, with me.
RAM: I stumbled upon GeIL a while back when searching for some decent DDR2 RAM and just happened to find their black dragon RAM, and I liked how cool it looked. After some research, they turned out to be a rather impressively dedicated to quality company, that also happens to be a rather common OEM supplier for other companies. They stress test up to a 1000 sticks of a batch at up to 100 fucking C FFS!
Also, once you go black dragon, you want black dragon.. those LEDs make you weak in the knees after a while. So I happily searched to make sure they had DDR3, and they did, thankfully.
Graphics Card: This was VERY HARD to convince myself to buy. Like I already stated, I've never, EVER been the type to own the most expensive card, much less have I ever spent as much as I did on just about every part excluding the RAM on any part I've ever purchased. But again, I wanted to future proof the shit out of this build, and I was tired of having to tone down the resolution, or the AA. Also didn't like seeing my computer choke back when I played Arkham Asylum when the PhysX stuff was on screen.
Went with the superclocked because it was only 30 dollars more, and because I've had great experience in the past with EVGA's manufacturer overclock.. tends to be more accepting of the more... "harsh" OCing I put graphics cards through towards the end of my use of them. Also I figured it would buy me a couple of months down the road before I actually need to OC it myself.
Total Parts Cost: ~$1275.00
Tell me what you guys think .