Sucess!
After gathering up the parts I finished building the computer three days ago and have been testing it since. So far its been solid and I haven't had any issues with it. Now to details. I did hit a few snags with the hardware side that mostly dealt with physical space between components and a few items that were out of stock.
The Cooler Master GeminII was too big when placed next too the Corsair Vengence heat sinks. I was forced to pick up a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus which is more a vertical oriented cpu cooler. It's snug next to the Ram heat sinks but has the bonus of pulling air directly across them for extra cooling. I guess I will keep the GeminII as an emergency backup.
I had also planned on picking up a ASUS Xonar Xense but after doing more research I came to realize that it wasn't for me. I went with a more classic soundcard format: Xonar DX. I picked up the Logitech Speaker System Z623 which is working great with the soundcard. Bass is really sweet on it!
The Radeon Twin Frozr III video cards must be insanely popular because I couldn't find them
anywhere in stock. I went with one model down and did the Twin Frozr II in SLI. They heat up quickly but there are some great software controls that come with them to help you set up how aggressive you want to be with their cooling. And once the graphic load drops down they cool off crazy quick.
The Corsair 800D is truly a beast (as some of you warned me) and I have some great pictures of it's box and the tower itself to show how huge it is. It comes three fans already and I installed an extra three; the fans are pretty quiet and all of them are the same color as the case. As I don't have any LEDs and such in the components or fan the whole assembly is a Darth Vader black! The only blinking lights are the power button and hardrive LED on the front panel.
Cons:
As I mentioned in earlier posts, far too many of the components come with either no documentation or just plan terrible ones. As I don't have pad or a laptop its a serious pain to deal with this. Corsair was a
big abuser of this as I had to download everything I needed from online resources. Radeon comes in second with their terrible documentation for their video cards. The Slipstream 120mm case fans come in Japanese language packaging (who knew?) but I was able to figure them out by looking at the fans already in the case. The Power Supply had nicely marked cables but was completely unlabeled itself; once again, I had to go online to find the details I needed.
I do want to note that none of my complaints are based on Tech Report.
Pros:
The Tech Report itself is a huge one; being able to build a system that has already been pretested by pros takes a lot of stress out of the process. There are a lot of good articles for research hear and I learned a lot by reading through the forums.
I picked on Corsair before, but now I also need to give them some praise. All of their stuff showed up well packaged and with all of their parts. The power supply came in a separate black bag, with the Corsair logo, when I opened up its box. Classy! The modular cable setup too a bit of getting used to but is a great concept in my book... I was also pleased that the cables themselves were clearly labeled and insulated.
I have a lot of praise for the Corsair 800D case. It has a visually powerful presence and a ton of room to work with inside. I don't know about you guys, but I don't have the smallest hands so I found this to be a blessing. Installing SSD and regular HDs was clean and painless. Installing my Blu Ray player involved no screws of any kind! Another huge bonus is all the cable holes that are scattered throughout this beauty. I'm not very clean with my cabling but this build actually looks nice. If you get a chance to poke around in one of these cases I think you will be pleased as well. Be warned, it does take a bit of upper body strength to move around.
Lastly, the Asus P8Z68 has some of the best documentation when compared to everything else. There is no Northbridge fans and such but plenty of cooling fins (is that what they call them?) CPU installation went without a hitch. I also found out that this motherboard is very popular with some of my local computer stores. One of them told me that its their first choice when building pre-made systems. The motherboard is very fan friendly and I believe has six dedicated spots to plug your case fans in. There is also some great software that they included for controlling your CPU fan.
In conclusion, a big education for me and a very happy result.
My thanks to everyone who commented and gave me advice on this!
