TR Forums

Okay, well a fellow I work with just ordered some upgrade parts for his system.
He will be keeping his case ( CM-690 ), GPU ( AMD 5950 ), HDD, 2xWD Caviar Black 500GB ), and PSU ( PCP&C Quad750).
Peripherals like monitor mouse and OS are all set, so that won't be a problem.

So here is what her ordered:

Mobo - Asus P8Z68-V/Gen3
CPU - Intel Core i5 2500k
Memory - Corsair XMS3 Classic 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz CL9

The choices were his, based a bit on the holiday TR guide, and I think it's okay. The substitutions he's made seem to make sense for him. It's going to be a gaming machine, and he got the RAM for a real good price.
He also grabbed a Hyper 212+ and is asking me to do a bit of overclocking, which I'm happy to do.

Just wondering what people thought about the choices? He already ordered, so nothing can be swapped, but thoughts on what he might see so far as experience would be appreciated.

Looks like a perfectly standard enthusiast gaming setup as far as I'm concerned. The 2500k offers great performance value for its price (better than amd). Asus easily has the best UEFI implementation of all mobo manufacturers, and Z68 will allow him to use quick sync along with his discrete card and SSD caching if he wants (i would suggest a straight up SSD OS drive instead though) DDR3 RAM is dirt cheap right now. Because of that, 8GB for a gaming rig is perfectly acceptable. 1600mhz cl9 and 1.5V are standard. You can get that sort of stuff for under $40 these days.

These choices also reflect closely to TR's "Sweet Spot" system build specs

Cool, cool.
He has big plans for upgrading further later.
GPU, and maybe a solid state OS drive.

So just assembled the system. Seems to be working fine.
Decided to try to overclock.
Tried the auto utility...kept crashing.
From the BIOS went through some tweaks, and it is sitting at 4.327GHz. Been doing some small fft's for about an hour now.
Stable so far. Not a huge overclock...but pretty good, yes?