I love this site, I seriously do. I was, how to put it, ignorant, yeah, ignorant, before I found this place.
I've built a number of systems in my time, but honestly beyond "motherboard supports this kind of memory and that kind of processor and this expansion slot" I never paid any attention to compatibility between components (which may explain why some of them have been less than stable).
With my latest build, and the awesome system guides on tech report, I'm trying to pay more attention to how everything works together. I used an amalgam of some of the builds, and I was wondering if anyone would like to have a look over it and let me know if I'm being stupid or should be using something different? I'm also trying to find a decent CPU cooler without going to the trouble of rolling my own liquid cooling. I'm trying to build something relatively quiet, but that can perform under modern gaming loads (plus I'm also a developer, but compiling is no big thing these days). Also, power. I have no idea how much power I'll need, or how to tell, so any advice I can get around that would be fantastic.
So, onto the build:
Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V LK
CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR3-1600
Graphics: EVGA GeForce GTX670 2GB 02G-P4-2670-KR
SSD: Corsair Force Series 3 240GB
HDD: 2 x 3TB Western Digital Caviar Green (will be running in a RAID mirror)
Optical: Some kind of Blu-Ray burner, don't know that it really matters which one.
Sound: Asus Xonar DX
Case: Corsair Graphite 600T White
PSU: This one I'm not sure about, for the above reasons, but I'm thinking something modular just to keep things flowing nicely for cooling, and given energy prices over here in Australia preferably a gold 80 plus certification.
So, all up so far this is looking to cost about AUD$1900, so with PSU and cooling my budget it looking to be about AUD$2400 (it's so much more expensive thanks to the Not In America tax).