Thanks everyone for the supportive comments. I love the TR community. I know it's a lot of money to blow on a system. In the past I've bought Dell refurbished dented systems to save money. This is my first PC I'm building myself.
Killadark: I have looked at 290X prices and I'm very jealous of them. $279 for a faster card with more VRAM.. But my last two cards have been AMD (5770, 7950) and I have wanted to go back to Nvidia ever since I upgraded from the 9600 GSO 768MB card I used from 2009-11. I appreciate the better driver support from Nvidia. Plus, if I bought a 290X then the 3D vision kit would be a waste, and that's one of the main reasons for building THIS system. If I wasn't targeting 3D, then I'd probably be satisfied with frame times in the 16-25 ms range, now that we have variable refresh.
Nanoflower: Thanks. I've been somewhat worried about SLI issues, but Tomshardware posted a good article from a few days ago that said that SLI in 2015 is actually really good, and most of its remaining problems are at 4K resolution. I'll be gaming at 1440p and I don't usually buy games on launchday so I can afford to wait for driver and developer patches. Plus DX12 is coming out soon and we keep hearing things about Nvidia focusing on improved SLI performance for VR. I would be shocked if the upcoming improvements aren't backwards compatible with the Maxwells.
DPete27: Point taken!
Won't the $4 fan work OK? It's 120mm. Is your problem with it that it won't help cool the system much, or that it will be too loud? If it breaks I can always replace. The case comes with two and I wanted a third to created a positive pressure system.
Superjawes: Haha yeah I could've splurged on better sound. I'm not an audiophile though. I can't appreciate a huge difference to make the extra expense worth it. I wanted to focus on graphical performance and storage speed with this PC (This is actually my first SSD!). And anyway, I love the G930; I bought it back in December and just included it in today's list because otherwise people would be asking what I planned to do for sound/speakers. I think it's a pretty great headset especially for gaming, and I love the surround. Once in a while there are Logitech driver quirks, but nothing that can't be fixed by resetting the software. I LOVE wireless headsets that let me get up and go to the bathroom or the kitchen without taking them off.
Flatland_Spider: Not sure a single GPU could handle 3D Vision well at 1440p. I spent $640 on the 970s. That's only slightly more than one 980 and still much cheaper than the TitanX. The one thing I considered was waiting for the next round of cards to come out in the next few months. But I've already been waiting months and the 970s are very highly rated especially for the resolution I'm targeting. I hope they'll work fine. I'm pretty sensitive to microstuttering, though. I'll let you know how it goes. As for the SSD, I targeted $/GB. I'm sure there are some faster drives out there, but my current PC just has a mechanical HDD so I'm going to notice a huge increase in performance no matter what. As long as the drive doesn't fail.. knock on wood.. Agree that the Blu Ray is probably unnecessary; could've put that $50 somewhere else. Seemed like a good value, though. And it'll get some use, still, I'm sure.
Spyrano: Good advice about the battery backup. I was under the impression that i7s weren't that much better than i5s for gaming performance, maybe 1-2% in most cases especially if the i5 is overclocked above 4 Ghz. That's why I bought the huge CPU cooler. i5 was $225 and i7 would've been $340.
Southrncomfortjm: $1000 for just the GPU is out of my price range. That would've put the total over $3k. The wife is already jealous enough as it is.
Thanks again for all the commments and the support everyone. The most common suggestion seems to be foregoing the dual 970s in favor of a single GPU, which would have to be the 980 because going to AMD would mean giving up 3D vision and the $1000 TitanX is out of the question, cmon now. My thinking was that the GTX 980 isn't even top tier anymore, yet it is still a bad value compared to its little brother. 60-70% more $$ for only 10-15% better performance. Two 970s for $640 outperforms one 980 for $500-550 in most situations, I think. Hard to say for sure, because Scott doesn't include SLI tests in his "Inside the Second" benchmarks very often (seeing the 295X2 in the TitanX review gave me hope that might change, though). Other sites made me pretty confident that 2x970 > 1x980 in my situation. More VRAM would be nice, but at 1440p I think I'll be fine.
I guess the other point to make is that you guys seem to think this PC is much higher end than I envisioned it. The hardware itself is $1656, and only $996 before you add the GPUs. The monitor was freakin expensive and because I didn't skimp too hard on the peripherals, that added up to $300+ for 3D Vision, headset, mechanical keyboard, and 6 button mouse (this is my first mechanical keyboard, actually. Lots of firsts! First SSD, first SLI, first 3D system, first G-sync system, first overclocked CPU, first PC I built myself). Here's the breakdown of the $2865:
22% GPUs
35% other hardware
28% monitor
12% peripherals
3% software (Windows)
With some of your guys' suggestions I could've easily added a few hundred dollars more to the purchase; dropping from two 970s to one 980 would've saved $100. Ditching 3D vision and going for AMD 4K Freesync would've saved $400-500 maybe. You guys are right for calling me out for skimping on the case fan. If I add a 4th or 5th fan or it turns out the $4 fan is really that crappy, I'll grab a $10 Fractal Silent R2 instead (especially if I see it pop up in a slickdeal). Hey at least the PSU isn't likely to explode on me, right?
