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I appreciate your effort to make a complete list, Arclight, but I'm curious why the OP should need the $185 GA-Z87X-UD4H motherboard that you listed instead of something like this $105 ASRock Z87M Pro4 motherboard.

So I just found out that I live about an hour away from a Micro center. I looked at their prices and I noticed that the 4770K goes for 260. Wow that's almost 100 dollars cheaper than newegg!

That's pretty sweet. Doing this will free up an extra 90 dollars and if I drop the sound card (I already switched my PSU) and drop the CPU cooler and hold on on OC for now and just use the basic intel CPU cooler I can def keep my 4770k and my GTX 770 from Zotac.

If I go this route, I can get a 240gig SSD and a 1TB HDD from WD black edition. This seems like the best solution atm.

So in short (without links) I honestly thought that linking the actual parts would make it way easier for you guys lol.

Corsair 200R
Asus Gryphon Z87
Crucial M500 240 gig SSD/ WD Black 1TB HDD
CORSAIR Vengeance Pro 8GB
Core i7 4770k
SeaSonic SSR-650RM
Windows 7 64 bit. (not going with 8 i'm hell bent on that just like the zotac 770 and the 4770K)

I will get a sound card/CPU cooler later on.

This sounds good to me

Also for future reference please don't dumb things down to make it cheaper. I want a really strong gaming PC for 1500 dollars. I want quality stuff. Now I know 1500 isn't that much. But i'm trying my best to milk it as hard as I can when it comes to quality.

As for the case, I think this is a fine case. I had two others in mind but they cost over 100 dollars (like 130) and they aren't much better than this one. The 200R seem like it will give me something nice for a very low price. Ive seen other cases that cost 60 bucks but they are FAR cheaper looking than this one. When I saw the 200R and saw its reviews and videos I had to get it. 60 bucks vs 130 was a deal breaker for me.

You can save another $30 if you get a motherboard and CPU together in a bundle at Micro Center.
$290 Core i7-4770K + MSI Z87-G41
$335 Core i7-4770K + Asus Z87-A
$350 Core i7-4770K + ASRock Z87-Extreme 4
$370 Core i7-4770K + Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H
$385 Core i7-4770K + Asus Z87 Pro
$280 Core i5-4670K + ASRock Z87-Extreme 4

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Prestige Worldwide being picky and unhelpful wrote:

I would have offered some suggestions but couldn't be arsed clicking on 10 different links to figure out what you were shooting for.

You might have noticed that I did list the prices, part names and descriptions for all of the OP's links in the first reply to this thread.

Didn't bother reading further than the first post due to the whole "couldn't be arsed" thing

Sweet dood! :3

Ima take one of the asus bundles. I want an Assus mobo that's why.

Thank you for being so helpful Now I can make a pretty awesome gaming PC for under 1500 dollars

Now i'm debating on either the Z87-A or the Pro bundle.

diasflacog wrote:

Also for future reference please don't dumb things down to make it cheaper. I want a really strong gaming PC for 1500 dollars. I want quality stuff. Now I know 1500 isn't that much. But i'm trying my best to milk it as hard as I can when it comes to quality.

If you want quality stuff then your budget cannot be a hard limit. You are a bit self-contradictory here.

We tried to suggest things where you can pare down without noticeable differences (save for using stopwatches to time things) to fit a budget that you said are hell bent on not breaching. We are not dumbing it down. The lost of "omg 4 cores!" is not going to be very tangible in games and general productivity work. The HT cores are not real cores per se and unless you are doing rendering and/or heavy math calculations with well-threaded applications, you are not going to be seeing the difference. Then you might come on here and express buyer remorse on "wasting money" or something down the road. OTOH, a bonafide SSD will give you noticeable, quality improvement. As for GPUs, a higher end card may last you longer in the future, but at present, when you are already super smooth when all the games you throw at it are turned to the max, getting more GPU is not going to improve things, unless you want the fps number for bragging rights.

We are trying to fit your "hard" requirements here. When you have enough constraints, you have to compromise. That's just normal procedure when putting together a build list.

I'm just like everyone else =P

I want high quality stuff for cheap! You can't blame me for that lol. But i'm very greatfull though. You guys already got me an SSD in there without dumbing anything down. I knew it was a good idea to come here first before buying anything

JustAnEngineer wrote:

You can save another $30 if you get a motherboard and CPU together in a bundle at Micro Center.
$290 Core i7-4770K + MSI Z87-G41
$335 Core i7-4770K + Asus Z87-A
$350 Core i7-4770K + ASRock Z87-Extreme 4
$370 Core i7-4770K + Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H
$385 Core i7-4770K + Asus Z87 Pro
$280 Core i5-4670K + ASRock Z87-Extreme 4

MOTHER OF GOD!

Those 4770k + motherboard deals are so good I want to gouge my eyes out. I wish we had Micro Center in Canada. A decent motherboard and 4770k in Canada usually go for upwards of $500.

Actually, after a quick check, the cheapest option at NCIX is $577 (although I suspect prices have increased over the last month due to our dollar tanking this month.)

Anywho, I felt like I got a pretty good deal grabbing an i7 3820 and an ASRock x79 Extreme 4 for $490 CAD last year.... but $290 for a 4770k and a motherboard is obscene!

That's the equivalent of a store paying you $70 and giving you a free motherboard on this side of the border, the cheapest a 4770k is going for these days is $350.

JAE totally came through for me

I think ima buy most if not all my PC parts from this store. I'm going to browse it for the other parts. If I can get most parts by simply driving there that would be awesome cuz I wont have to wait on shipping.

diasflacog wrote:

JAE totally came through for me

Excuse me? You're welcome for mentioning Micro Center...

diasflacog wrote:

Also for future reference please don't dumb things down to make it cheaper.

Pretty condescending statement. Reading through, the majority of recommendations here were still very high quality parts. It's fun to build a new rig, but don't let that excitement shroud your common sense. You don't have to spend a fortune to get an excellent gaming machine that will last many, many years. Word from the wise: Don't pay extra for features you'll never use.

DPete27 wrote:

diasflacog wrote:

JAE totally came through for me

Excuse me? You're welcome for mentioning Micro Center...

diasflacog wrote:

Also for future reference please don't dumb things down to make it cheaper.

Pretty condescending statement. Reading through, the majority of recommendations here were still very high quality parts. It's fun to build a new rig, but don't let that excitement shroud your common sense. You don't have to spend a fortune to get an excellent gaming machine that will last many, many years. Word from the wise: Don't pay extra for features you'll never use.

Thank you for all the tips ^^

I'm def very excited now. Specially since I haven't built a PC before. Unfortunately Micro Center doesn't have all of my parts. But that's ok because that Mobo and CPU bundle is great. I'm going with the Z87-A bundle. I'll get the rest from newegg.

Hey doods =)

So I built my PC about a week ago and everything turned out perfectly fine especially for my first build

I ended up these parts. Corsair 200R, Asus Z87-A, core i7 4770K, 16gb crucial ballistic sport (ram), 120gb Samsung Evo 840, 2TB Seagate HDD, GTX 770, Corsair RM650, (I like corsair more than the other brands) and Win7 64bit the rest of the things don't really matter =P

As you would expect my performance is nothing short of amazing compared to my old dell pc. That micro center recommendation was great im lucky enough to have one here in socal about 50 mins away so again thank you guys again for all the tips I'm very please with my new system. I'm currently playing Tomb Raider, RE6, and PSO2 (a Japanese MMO type game) and im currently waiting for Titan Fall, The Evil Within, and Wolfenstein the new order.

All that aside there are a couple of minor annoyances but still worth mentioning. When I try to install yahoo messenger it can't install on my system for some odd reason. It always crashes and wont install. Also, bandicam doesn't work on my system either I'm able to install it but when I double click on the desktop icon to launch it it crashes and it crashes my whole system too. I have to press the reset button on my PC case. It completely locks up my system (pretty scary stuff!)

Any idea why these programs seem to fail on me? I tried installing them in the ssd and hdd and same thing happens. I even checked my ram timings on my bios and they are spot on everything seems to be in perfect working order , but I just can't get these programs to work on my system. I even googled the error and nothing.

It's not the end of the world if I can't use these two programs, but it would be nice to know why they refuse to work on my PC.