Buying New Gaming PC: 4 GB GTX 770 SLI vs. single 3 GB GTX 780 Ti for 1080p Monitor and Other Component Questions.

Well the 850 watt gold certified psu will run up to 2 780 ti's in sli.

two 770s will outperform a single 780ti by about 30% in most games, but then you have the possibly issues that come with dual cards.

As far as your liquid cooler, i would go with an h-80, as it is just a thicker radiator and performs better for just a little more cost (assuming you just want a radiator that fits in a single 120mm fan mount space

the hard drive is fine, but for gaming, if you wanted to put your most played games on an ssd along with your operating system, you will not get better fps, but loading screens will be almost non-existant in most games compared to a mechanical drive, so it's up to you. No you do not need a hard drive cooling fan if you just have even moderatly poor airflow in your case

the motherboard you picked out is actually not a bad one at all for your needs, so i'd stick with that

Personally i hate windows 8 as well, and windows 7 home premium is good unless you are wanting MORE than 16gb of ram (8gb is more than enough for gaming)

as far as the speed of ram, for gaming you will not even get a single fps difference going with 2133 over 1600 mhz. (MAYBE 1 fps at best case)

with the motherboard you picked, you would better off NOT getting a sound card at all, as asrock has pretty good onboard audio and works with up to 5.1 (personal opinion and many reviewers will tell you the same thing) An external dac is much better and can be had for around the same price)

I would say go with the 4770k processor INSTEAD of getting a sound card, as it is money much more well spent

Personally, as i know many people have problems with dual cards, i'd go with the single 780ti, as you will also save money on your power bill with it, and it will max any game to date on a 1080p screen and be silky smooth. This also allows you to buy a second 780ti when the time comes to upgrade to 4k

If you're only gaming, the i5 will actually be better in most situations... however, with the new console generation having 8 cores, you're likely to see more games provide better multi-tasking, which means the i7 is a little more future-proof. You don't necessarily need the K version, though. The non-K is still very fast and actually has more features enabled... though those will make little difference in gaming. There isn't really a lot you'll notice about overclocking a Haswell i7 on modern games and wot, though, considering your GPU (even the best ones) will be the limiting factor. Yes, even for Guild Wars. Intel's so far ahead in CPU space that it's dual-core solutions can compete with AMD's hex or even Octo-core solutions, and game designers are going to make sure their games run well on those chips. I wouldn't bother with liquid cooling for a non-extreme edition chip, though. A 212 EVO will have more than enough headroom for a sizable overclock, be much cheaper, and much, much easier to set up and maintain. I can't recommend the ~2kg air coolers, though. They might be awesome for keeping it cool, but if your computer shakes too much in moving, it can literally snap your motherboard in half. Also, make sure you have good case cooling if you go with any CPU cooler that does not blow air directly down onto the motherboard, or you may burn it out.

The new consoles also bring about updates to RAM requirements. For future games, 8GB will be a -minimum-. If you do only get 8, make sure you leave slots for an upgrade to 16 in the future. Note, however, that increasing the amount of ram you have will improve hard disk performance and lifetime, and given that unless you get a nice SSD that will be the biggest bottleneck on the system, and that improved SSD life is very good anyway, I cannot recommend less than 16GB of RAM, especially if you're spending in the 2k+ range.

As far as RAM speed goes, the faster your processor, the more hungry it's going to be for RAM. If you really intend to pull a 20%+ overclock, you'll almost certainly want the faster RAM, to avoid wasting clock cycles. Like your CPU, however, in most games CPU / RAM speed is not the bottleneck; you will not notice a difference, unless you're also using the computer for heavy multitasking or CPU-bound design software.

As far as SSD's are considered, in-game, they don't make much difference (unless you only have, like, 4GB of RAM and are running things in the background while gaming). What they will make a huge difference with, however, is system boot times and responsiveness. It's the difference between a start menu taking 5 seconds to open and / or load items and opening instantly with everything pulled up. Seriously, load times pretty much disappear for items on the SSD, and it speeds up your regular type hard drives, too, since they aren't under constant load from system files. There is nothing you can do to make your system feel faster than getting an SSD.

Hard drive cooling isn't strictly necessary, but you want to make sure they have some airflow, as it causes them to fail far less often. For this reason, most cases have fans in front of the hard drive mounts. This is typically sufficient, even if you have lots of hard drives.

The 780Ti will max out it's 3GB on intense games at 4k, this is true, however, likely due to the huge amount of memory bandwidth it provides, it will still outperform cards (and sometimes even multiple cards) with more memory. Under such conditions, it will still pull even with a r9 290x that has not maxed out its buffer; it's truly a beast of a card, and even for 4K, the fastest on the market currently. You might, however, be better off waiting for a 6GB version or Nvidia to pull out Maxwell, which, if nothing else, will reduce the price on the 780Ti.

Sound card is absolutely not necessary. Even if you are somewhat picky about sound, you need to spend roughly $200 on speakers before you'll be able to tell much difference between sound on the motherboard and a dedicated card.

Windows 8's main problem is the horrid GUI. It's actually much more efficient than Windows 7 on a lot of tasks, but the usability is crippled for me, so I've stuck with 7 on everything but my test laptop. I've yet to see anything actually use DirectX 11.2.