PS calculators lie through their teeth. A 550w unit will be more than enough.
I have an ROG board, because they're bloody incredible when it comes to their small form factor builds because of how tightly packed they are... they aren't really worth it for ATX boards.
Lemme just tell you this: You're TRYING to waste money here. Like, seriously. A $2000 budget is too much for what you're doing, and there are a lot of other issues. Lemme go down the list to try to help you save money and not have hideous buyer's remorse.
1) Don't buy an i7. If when you say you're doing a bit of CAD, you mean you're doing renders for work and school, and thus need them to complete in as little time as possible because your time equals money, go for it, but if you're just playing around with it, it's a hideous waste of money. The only difference between an i7 and an i5 is that the i7 has a tiny bit more L3 cashe, which doesn't matter for gaming, and hyperthreading. There are a lot of people on these forums, especially new posters begging for "best answers," who don't understand how hyperthreading works. Hyperthreading only applies to double-precision workloads - i.e. calculations that have to be accurate to some hundredth decimal place. Games should not be doing hardly ANY of these calculations; those that are are not well optimized. That means that for gaming, an i7 is $100 more for perhaps a 3% improvement in all of 5 whole games... and no, that's not going to change in the future.
2) Don't get a closed loop cooler. There are WAAAYYY too many issues. They're noisy, they aren't any better than big air coolers, they have more moving parts and so are more likely to fail, and when they do fail, they're going to do so catastrophically. A water cooler failure means liquid all over your expensive computer, and then your CPU frying itself because it has nothing to remove the heat. A heatsink failure means your fan dies, maybe a part breaks off and scratches your paint, but you've still got this huge metal heatsink allowing the CPU time to downclock safely. Since you really aren't going to be doing any fancy overclocking, I'm guessing, you should go with something like a Hyper 212 EVO. It's only $30, and will easily get your chip to about 4.2-4.4 GHz.
3) Don't buy a $200 motherboard. After about $150, motherboards' value drops off incredibly rapidly. I would suggest something like the AsRock z87 Extreme 4. I know some people don't like the brand because they make budget boards, but what they don't realize is that AsRock began as a subsidiary of Asus. They were tasked with making a better budget motherboard, and did so well that they split into their own brand.
4) You're wasting a lot of money there. For $70, you can get 8GB of ram, which is enough to simultaneously run battlefield 3, photoshop, AND 30 tabs in chrome. There's no reason to go with 16 unless you KNOW that you're going to be using it all when rendering... and if you don't know, get 8, and then you can throw another two sticks in later to upgrade to 16.
5) That's really close to a good pick on the SSD, but there's no reason to get the pro when there is no noticeable difference between it and the EVO for $40 less.
6) Getting a WD Black is up to you - I tend to pick the Blues, as they're cheaper, slightly faster, and I'm not worried about the 5-year warranty. The warranty doesn't cover data recovery, so you should be backing up regularly anyways.
7) Good god that's overkill on your video card, dude. A 770 for two HUNDRED less dollars is going to pretty much max out everything at 1080p. You're also way way way better off getting a cheaper card now and upgrading later - you could either get a second 770, possibly used, and put them in SLI, or just sell this one and get a new card in 2-3 years when you're noticing that your performance in games is dropping to an unacceptable level. That way, at the end of 3-4 years, instead of having a 4-year old card that's starting to REALLY show its age, you either have two medium-power cards, or a newer and still higher-end card. If you're doubtful of this, go look at NCIX's youtube video on why there's no such thing as future proofing - he goes into this theory in much more detail.
8) Decent pick on the case, but you could go with a micro atx motherboard and case if you wanted to. Are the fans below it for the case or for your cooler? Because you should know that they won't fit on the cooler. They are really good fans, though.
9) Beautiful pick on the power supply - that's pretty much my go-to when I don't want the Seasonic x-650. (which isn't in PCpartpicker, but is pretty much the best power supply every made, period.)
10) As for the optical drive, you can install windows from a USB stick - consider if you really have anything that you use on a CD anymore. I scrapped optical drives in my computers long ago, and if I need something on a CD, just had an old portable CD reader that works for the rare occasions I need it to.
Your build as it's standing right now is $1880 - that goes up to well over $2000 when you consider that PCpartpicker doesn't include shipping and so you don't want to buy from more than two or maybe three places.
If you make the changes I recommend to you, you end up with something like this build, which is significantly cheaper - after the same shipping and whatnot, this rig (which will give you the exact same visible performance) is going to be at least $800 less.
PCPartPicker part list /
Price breakdown by merchant /
Benchmarks
CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($229.99 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($33.98 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock Z87 Extreme4 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($134.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($69.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($99.92 @ OutletPC)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($59.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 770 2GB Video Card ($329.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 (Black Pearl) ATX Mid Tower Case ($109.99 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: SeaSonic G 550W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($85.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $1147.83
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-01-12 06:01 EST-0500)
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