~$1500 Gaming Rig, Could Use Some Advice

A few questions and comments:

- Haswell comes out in a couple of weeks, so should at this point, should wait until that comes out to get set on your CPU/MB. Marginal performance upgrade, but you might as well take and and you'll have the current socket.

- Unless you're aggressively overclocking, a good air cooler is more practical than an off-the-shelf water. Are you dead-set on liquid?

- Are you open to new monitor(s) that support higher resolutions? If you're getting a new computer with a high-end GPU, seems kind of a waste to be at 1440 x 900.

- The Pro Samsung 840s have much better write speed than the vanillas.

- The 680 is kind of an inefficient purchase. The 770 coming out is essentially a 680 and will be a lower price. And in this generation, 670 and 7970 give you much better bang for buck.

- Cooler Master makes great cases, but their PSUs are kind of meh. They have a new series coming out in the US any day (V Series) that is Seasonic-made that are much better, but except for that, again, meh. With your budget, I'd rather go with a Seasonic, Corsair, Antec, PCP&C, and some others.

- How high-end is your CAD work? You may be one of the people that would benefit from the 3770k/4770k rather than the 3570k/4670k.

Get swiftech 220 if you want to watercool

This memory
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/crucial-memory-blt2k8g3d1608et3lx0

Get swiftech 220 if you want to watercool

This memory
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/crucial-memory-blt2k8g3d1608et3lx0

I had been hearing mixed things about the Haswell cores and so I wasn't sure if it would be worth the wait. I have also been reading that people should wait until after the first run of these cores to purchase because of some sort of flaw though i cant recall what off the top of my head. Ifthis is the case and I was to buy a Haswell how long would I need to wait after their June release to purchase a good one?

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There's an S3 sleep state issue that has to be fixed in hardware. But it really only affects certain behaviors. For example, the hardware.info example is if you were viewing a PDF on a USB flash drive and the computer went to sleep, you'd have a blank page when the PC woke up. Stuff like that. Only can tell if it's a big deal given your PC usage. For most people, I doubt they'd even notice and it wouldn't personally stop me if I needed an upgrade. It's not an issue like that early Sandy Bridge chipset that Intel actually had to stop production and recall.

Nope I am not set on water cooling and don't know that I will overclock much.

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In that case, a good air cooler is probably a better choice for you. Two of the most recommended coolers ar the Cooler Mayster Hyper 212 Plus for moderate overlocking (around $30) and the Noctua NH-D14 for higher overlocking (around $90). Liquid cooling can really kind of be a pain and if it's not custom, it's generally not some giant leap forward from good air coolers.

I haven't found any hard release dates but yes I was thinking about a 770 or 780 if they were going to be released by mid June.

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I believe that they hit May 30th, but don't quote me on that. They should be benchmarked pretty quickly -- there's a lot of competition in reviews! The 780 will be a very expensive GPU and is expected to be a couple hundred more than the 680.

I will look into a different PSU i selected that one because it was 80+ platinum and assumed that that meant that it would be a good component I am honestly not sure what to look for with PSU's.

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Generally speaking, it's good to check the reviews at jonnyguru and hardwaresecrets and places that really take apart the PSUs, look at their capacitors and filters and such and can measure their various protections. The 80+ platinum refers to the efficiency -- it's kind of the gas mileage for the PSU. But there's more to it than that, you also want power supplies that are dependable, regulate voltage well, protect against noise damaging your parts, etc. There's a solid list of recommended PSUs at http://www.johnnylucky.org/power-supplies/psu-recommendations.html. Cooler Master does have a new V series coming out with Seasonic parts. They're not terrible PSUs generally, just kind of middling.

It is not high end, no 3D just a single 2D page. While an i7 may give me a performance edge I don't believe that it would be necessary with the level of drafting that I am doing and the frequency at which i am doing it.

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In that case, you are probably correct that you don't need the performance edge and can put the budget to better use elsewhere. The 3570k is a standard recommendation for very good reasons, but I did want to check and make sure you wouldn't need the i7. Sorry for the interrogation, but the more information, the better the advice!

Ok well then with it being as close as it is to release then I will most likely update this in early June with Haswell releases. I don't really care if I have to reopen a file after my computer goes to sleep. Generally speaking I don't work on anything like that on my home PC anyways.

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Yeah, more of a slight annoyance than anything. As I said, I can see certainly people getting a headache (it also is just the USB3) if there's something specific that they do that it causes a problem for, but I can't imagine it'll come up very often, if ever, for most. Heck, I never use sleep on the desktop anyway -- if I'm not on it for a long period of time, I just turn it off given that the SSD drive makes boots painless.

Thank you for the handy list I have updated my build to reflect the new power supply it was surprising to see how many of those companies did not manufacture their own components. I also updated the build to reflect the memory suggested earlier.

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Yup, a lot of the good ones use the same manufacturers. What can be frustrating is when PSU companies use different manufacturers, some very good and some not (Rosewill and OCZ are two prominent examples). That's a very good supply -- you'll be able to run a second GPU at some point if you wish and it's solid and dependable enough that you can probably bring it to a future new build.