Seriously calm the F*CK down buddy! You'd think I just told you to go have anal sex with your dad or something. It's not a debate for crying out loud, he might not be as tech savy as others and that's why he is asking for help. You guys were going off on how shitty the bundle was but not one actually came up with an alternative. Kenny needs to come up with what CPU he wants and then everyone should have fun building mocks up and see who can put together the best system for his price range.

Kenny pick which CPU you want to go with and everyone have fun putting together a mock up and post it here and we can all have fun seeing what everyone did and maybe we can all learn something as well. In the end we all have fun and Kenny gets a computer!

The CPU should be the easiest decision.

i5 3570K

I never intended to make you angry man,nor am i angry, it was a simple statement of fact that had you read what i posted before you would understand why it was a bad build. Yes he has asked for help, im trying to offer it. Note that i have not attacked anyone for lack of knowledge or any such thing, where people have been wrong about something i have corrected them though. As this is a advice/knowledge based thread i believe that i am correct in doing so, or else why would he have asked for help?

Anyway onto tarnish's specs(not going to quote em all):
So lets see where to start.....
Mobo pros/cons:
pros:
the spacing/design of the motherboard are GREAT, depending on heatsink you could block out some of the ram slots though(not an issue with the one you went with) but more importantly the PCI slot location allows for maximum usage, not as common as you would think. Also placement for various connectors is just wonderful. its a board i would like to work with.

cons:
the PCI tech is old for this new of a board. Since it doesnt support PCI 3.0 it leaves a lot to be desired in the upgrade potential department, and at 200$(currently) you could do better.

Ram pros/cons:
Pros:
good price, insane speed for the money.

Cons:
god that starting cas latency is ugly. However as stated before, the speed your hitting your bus at beats out cas latency, and as i dont see anything in its class, even if it had a starting cas latency of 11 it would beat out anything in the same range easily.

heatsink/case fans:
solid brand/equipment, REALLY like the high rise design to the heatsink, obviously this frees up all our ram slots, however its height has to be accounted for in what case you get.

PSU pros/cons:
Pros:
High end capacitors, good voltage(850w), quad rail. Basically if lightning dont fry this thing it will outlive your other components by a long shot. Though i dont recommend reusing the PSU in a second build 4-5 years down the road this thing is damn near good enough to tempt me.

Cons:
As i (unless seriously pressed) wouldnt reuse a PSU for fear of failure and frying my components, this thing is over priced. you should be able to find a comparably good PSU from the 75-150$ range depending on sales/time of year etc. thats a rather nice chunk of change that can be saved. still disregarding the money aspect, i have NOTHING else bad to say about it.

Processor pros/cons:
Cons: kind of as i was talking about earlier, many times that extra tad bit of mhz dont mean that much, you could have gone with a 8120 and saved some cash and never noticed the difference. other than that, you didnt go to the insane high end either so a middling buy :P

Graphics card(gpu):
Cons: well as you know(because you mentioned it on steam) it runs hot and is getting up their in age. However here is where that mobo comes to bite you in the ass, with no PCI 3.0 support upgrading becomes MUCH more limited, and considering your current case heat levels going to dual cards becomes a BIG no no without upgrading to a better case, at which point you might as well toss in the extra 75-150(or as you did 200)$ and get a mobo that supports sli 3.0. Or since you seem to be doing ok with your current machine i would wait till 4.0 starts coming out in boards(2014-15) and probably a few months past that to let prices on 4.0 boards to go down some.

Monitor:
pros: pretty pretty lights

Cons: hard to say for SURE, but it probably has a terrible black to white/white to black ratio. Generally when you see a component with only partial spec's listed, its because the rest of the specs are BAD and they dont want you to know it. Monitor tech has advanced enough this isnt AS huge of an issue, but i still wont buy something i dont know about, which would mean your monitor. its why i cant list pros or cons really, i dont know its specs because the manufacture didnt release them.


Anyway, thats what an hour and a half i just spent and i all i did was look up what you have and comment on it...Hope you see what i mean that to do something like this right takes a LOT of time. gonna go shoot stuff now.

Tiger direct is a terrible idea, bad customer service, dead end rebates, and an arma process from hell