What brand of Geforce GTX 780 TI should I get?

You "see no reason to go lower than i7" ...but why in the world would you do that. It is WASTING $100. Hyperthreading only applies to double-precision calculations and will not become relevant to gaming, period.

The onboard sound is great, yes, but there are other boards that cost far less that have the same quality sound.

And so what if it's a build over 3k? That does not mean you should just waste your money... it means you could spend it on, say, custom watercooling. Or a pair of graphics cards, since that's easy to fit in the budget.

Even if games are starting to use more ram, it's just barely getting to the point where 4GB isn't enough for the very high end games - and ram is very easy to add later.

If you filled up a 128GB SSD, then you were doing silly things with it... such as, say, putting battlefield 3 on it. The only benefit you get from putting games like that on it is you load into the round faster.. and then have to wait for everyone else to load. Yes, smaller SSDs are very slightly slower - you aren't going to even notice it. At all.

I did miss that he's going with one graphics card for now, though it would be easy to fit it into the budget.



Now, answertime:

Immaculate and I obviously have different philosophies when it comes to building a rig. I'm a firm believer that once something gets you sufficient performance, there's no reason to spend more for often-gimmicky features, and that the money could easily be spent in better ways elsewhere.

The 850w power supply will still be more than enough even if you SLI down the road. (Pcpartpicker's estimator, which is pretty good, has that rig at 722w. Add overclocking and you're at about 800w, meaning you have 50w left for a little depreciation.)

As for the i7, it's seriously not worth the money. Both processors overclock to the same level, which means the only differences between them is 6MB vs 8MB of L3 cashe, which isn't important for games, and hyperthreading... which games do not use and will not use in the future unless they are very very very poorly coded. (And since it costs more to develop a program to take use of hyperthreading, and it only applies to double-precision calculations, which games don't use... you can draw your on conclusions.)

I still stand firm on the RAM - you absolutely don't need 16GB - like I said, when you can run a project in photoshop AND a modern game AND 30 tabs in ram-hungry google chrome with just 8GB... (The ram brand is fine, though. If you want to overclock your ram, get the Ballistix Tactical Tracer - the half height stuff. It overclocks very well.)

Instead of the 840 pro, get the newer and cheaper 840 EVO - it's ever so slightly cheaper, but you wouldn't even notice it unless you were benchmarking your hard drive.

Other than that, I would strongly suggest looking at benq monitors rather than the Asus - I've used both and like the Benq better.

Sorry, that was poorly worded on my part - I was talking about two different points. First the fact that pretty much no games get a benefit from being on an SSD, and second, that he only had a single graphics card in his rig. (I missed that you were buying the second later.)