Is this configuration good?

[grozev]

Hi there!
My first post, though I've been reading these forums for the past couple of weeks. I am not sure if this is the right place to post this question, but it did seem most adequate.

My budget is not much, in fact I'm above the budget with this configuration, but I will postpone buying the monitor for a month or two to manage. So here's it is:

CPU - I7 2500k - planning on overclocking that to 4.5ghz
Cooling - Corsair H100 - decent cooling for that overclock
GPU - 2 x Asus GTX 570 DCUII - I know they are 3 slots, but I will put one of them on the first slot and the other one on the third slot and I will get a huge case so there will be enough space between the second gpu and the psu
Case - Coolermaster HAF X - like one of the biggest I found, big fan of CM
RAM - Corsair Vengeance 2x4gb 1600mhz - should be sufficient
Motherboard - Asus p8z68-v pro - big fan of asus, seems like a decent board
HDD - Seagate 2TB green 5900rpm - cheap massive hard
SSD - Corsair Force 120gb - to speed up everything
PSU - Corsair XH 850W - good value PSU, I know 850 is rather a lot, but overclocking the cpu and perhaps overclocking the gpus a bit too will probably require 750 and to be on the safe side I'm going for the 850

Monitor - basically any decent 24'' for around 130-140 pounds (200-220$)

So that's it. I'm open to any suggestions, critics, etc.

And I have one question - do you think the standard cooling on the ASUS GTXs (which is actually pretty amazing) and the H100 for the CPU and I will probably buy some better (quieter) fans for the case - is this all going to be enough for overclocking the system hard OR do you think I should get a water cooling loop going on. The water cooling loop (or kit) is gonna cost a fortune if I want to water cool the GPUs as well. I saw a post where a guy installed Corsair H70 Inside the Asus GTX 3 slotter and it looked amazing and his performance was amazing too, so if I buy 2 corsairs h70 for about 90 quid I will still have amazing cooling on the GPUs for rather less cash.

Please give me your thoughts on that.
Thanks a lot in advance.

On a second thought I might actually go for 1 gtx570 for the time being as new cards are coming up next year. And I will probably drop the DIY H70 thing, but still give me your thoughts!

 

[cmndr_andi]

Hi there and welcome

Your spec is really rather good and will certainly all work together, though if you are interested I would suggest a few optimistations:

First, I would suggest going for a large heatsink over a captive liquid cooler like the H100. I say this for a few reasons, mainly cost, noise and chance of leaks. In comparison a large CPU cooler like the Thermalright silver arrow runs much quieter, cools just as well, costs a lot less and has no chance of leaking. Here is an in depth review which compares the H100 and the silver arrow (that specific page shows the big difference between the noise profiles).

One thing you do need to change to accommodate a large heatsink is low profile RAM. However, this isn't much of a problem since the large heatsinks on 1600MHz 1.5V RAM are only there for looks. You can get similar performing 8GB low profile RAM kits for the same price or less. At the moment, this is the kit I would get.

The ASUS board you pick is pretty solid. If you are happy with ASUS then this shouldn't dissapoint (though I would personally recommend going for a MSI or Asrock board this generation over ASUS).

On the SSD front I would suggest going for a Crucial M4 over the Corsair (which uses the 2nd gen sandforce chipset). The M4 is generally a faster drive and is known to have less issues.

The PSU and HDD choices are ideal IMHO.

The one big problem I see you having is with the graphics cards. Since they have triple slot coolers then even when installed with two empty slots between them the two cards will sit directly on top of each other - so the intake fans on the top card will be greatly obstructed by the PCB of the second card. This will cause the top card to recieve sub-optimal cooling and may well cause issues down the line when the cards run at 100% load (ie in games). Therefore, I would strongly suggest going for dual slot graphics cards if you plan to run two of them.

That said, new 28nm graphics cards are about to be released next month. These are expected to be a good deal faster than the current 40nm cards. With this in mind many who are building new PCs in December are buying a singe decent speed but very good value graphics card now (generally in the price region of £100-200) with the intention of selling it at the start of next year when the new cards come out. You may want to consider something similar.

As for a monitor, I would strongly recommend this 23in ASUS monitor which uses an E-IPS panel. Compared to the more mainstream and cheaper TN panel monitors, IPS monitors like this offer much more accurate colours and wider viewing angles. Here is an in-depth review of this particular monitor.