$1200 System? Feedback wanted

Hi rayne2330 -

Responding to your updates:

"I plan on using this for everything, but mainly gaming. For school work and other things as well."
- The main difference between the I7 and the I5 is that the I7 supports hyperthreading. From a gaming and school work perspective, you won't see a benefit from the I7. If you plan to do lots of video transcoding (e.g., copying DVD movies and compressing for you iPad/phone/tablet, etc.) then the I7 will be a bit faster at this. I see you've dropped back to an Ivy-bridge option. Absolutely nothing wrong with this, and you'll get good gaming performance from this setup. Just a personal preference on my part, though, is to go for the most current chipset. If I were building, it would be an 1150 socket.

"My state doesnt have a micorcenter anywhere so thats out of my reach. "
-Sorry to hear this. I'm kind of a MicroCenter fanboy, just because I've always gotten good pricing and good advice from the sale associates. You may still be able to take advantage of Mobo bundle pricing for All the same, look through the various sites for pricing. I don't know what your timeframe is, but my personal approach is to get my parts list about 80% certain, and then spend a couple of months catching some of the items as they go on sale.

"What other mobo would you recommend thats cheaper?"
-Lots of good ones out there. Going back to the 1150 socket, I recently built a machine with the "MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate Socket LGA 1150 ATX Intel Motherboard." It's currently $99 at MicroCenter, plus shipping. It has 4 memory slots (two for now, two for later) which is a plus for me.

"Im rethinking my PSU right now, any recomendations?"
- I've used Corsair before, and they are a good manufacturer. Of course, there are lots of good manufacturers. I've used both modular and non-modular, and I prefer the modular ones. I like to over-buy a bit so I don't have to think about my PSU when I want to add another disk or device (for my primary home machine I started with a basic setup and am now up to 3 HDs, 2 SSDs, 1DVD, 1BluRay, 5 fans, and upgraded my graphics card.)
- You may try searching through some of the Tom's articles on PSUs, and you may want to look at the Tom's "System Builder Marathon" articles to see what those guys are using. Here are two links to articles that ran some time back. *DISCLAIMER* - I would not use any of these PSUs because I would personally want something with slightly higher total wattage. I would certainly consider any higher wattage PSU from any of these manufacturers. There might be some interesting background info in here for you, and you can see what manufacturers they reviewed.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/power-supply-review-80-plus-bronze,3568.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/power-supply-review-80-plus-bronze,3587.html



" I have looked at many other cases, and i favor this one heavily, if you have something you think is better then please share. I know of many other ones that are good and cheap, i just really like the look of it."
- If you like this case, then get it. The case is really the last component on my list, and I'm not terribly picky. You may want to review these Tom's articles on cooling. They changed the way I was thinking about cases and airflow:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cooling-air-pressure-heatsink,3058-5.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cooling-airflow-heatsink,3053-4.html


" I dont have an SSD, but i will prob upgrade later on, its not my biggest concern right now as it does not affect my performance."
-Absolutely nothing wrong with your setup above, but an SSD will make the whole system feel like it is responding more quickly. The very best option is to install one as your boot disk, and the easiest time to do that is when you're building the system (otherwise you'll have to re-install your OS, which is not that big of a deal, but a task I find cumbersome.) Beyond that, there are still good options for integrating one later. With a Z87 Mobo, you can use Intel's SRT to setup an SSD to cache your HD. You can also move your swap and temporary files off to it, you can re-install frequently used programs or games to your SSD later, etc. But again, absolutely nothing wrong with the setup you have listed.

" I plan on some light-medium overclocking, or as much as this cooler can let me, how much do you think i can push my CPU with this cooler? what other cooler would be best for medium overclocking at most?"
-There are others in the forum who can answer this better than I. If I were planning any overclocking on either of the two CPUs you picked above, I'd go with the better CPU cooler.

One other thought, and it's really more of a clarification to zichus's comment. The MOBO's you are considering support Dual Channel memory. So your performance will be better if you purchase 2x4GB of dual-channel instead of a single 8GB. The simple analogy is that you can mow your lawn twice as fast if you have two lawnmowers. Additionally I'd look for the DDR3-1600 instead of the -1333. As a final thought on this, with 8GB of RAM you might be able to get away with totally disabling your pagefile, but that's probably a topic for another thread.

Hope this helps; let me know if this sparks any other questions for you.

Good luck!

-GorfTheFrog