Doing a Major Overhaul of my Rig - What do you guys think?

Why the 4 SP fans? Those are static pressure fans, which are better for a water cooling rad, but you won't see any different in 2vs4 fan's on the all-in-one water cooling units.

In reality, I would either get a good air cooler, or a full out water cooling setup.

The All-in-one water coolers are there for the "I have water cooling" factor, but in reality, don't cool any better than air. The big minus I found of them is, with no giant heat-sink and fan near the motherboard, it gets hotter. Even though the CPU may be cooler, the rest of the board is hot, and that is just as bad. I regret mine, and wish I spent another $100 on my GPU and got a Hyper Evo 212 OR I spent like $50 more and got a real water cooling kit I can add on to.

In general your build is fine. A few points:

1) Not quite sure what you're doing with all the fans. Push/pull on the radiator? I personally would just get a good Noctua air cooler instead. I also see no point in pushing the i7 too high since you are unlikely to benefit from that. Very few games benefit from more than 3.6GHz even. Personally, I'd go no higher than 4.5GHz which a good Noctua (on this new refresh of the CPU) should do quieter than the liquid cooler.

*Liquid cooling requires you to rethink your entire air flow as you are supposed to have the fans as INTAKE not exhaust. Thus you need to have exhaust elsewhere on the case that is normally intake. Another issue is you get reduced air flow over the CPU voltage regulators. Just something to think about.

If your dead set on a liquid cooler then the Corsair H105 with its thicker radiator might be better. I'm not sure if push/pull benefits either. Linus from Techtips has a video or two on this.


1) I don't get noctua here. If I get it by luck, it will be hell expensive.. I live in a place that's pretty hot and dusty.. so trying to keep my pc cool is something major.. especially during summer where temps reach as high as 45C.

Are the stock fans any good with the H440? the SP are for the front three and one up, and the 140 is to replace the exhaust..

The plan is three fans pushing air inside from front, I'll mount three 120mm fans up for exhaust (two radiators + one SP. will that fit?) and one 140mm exhaust from back trying to maintain -ve pressure..



2) Motherboard: I prefer ASUS for quality. Going by your red/black theme I recommend this:
Asus Maximus Hero VII (a Z97 board)

2) Agreed. I tried to look for Asus and could get only the z97 a, k here, Asus is just not available and MSI gives me more value for money..



3) 160GB hard drive?
Why the heck do you have a 160GB drive? I recommend a 1TB or 2TB HDD.

FYI, hard drive read/write speeds decrease as you get closer to the center of the drive. So the Barracuda at 160GB (full up) is half the speed as on the outer edge.

So even if the Barracuda was faster on the outer edge the performance would quickly drop off so maybe at best it's faster for 10% (16GB) of the drive. Plus it's older technology.

3) Well.. I am actually having that 160GB since 7 years and never crossed my needs beyond 100 GB.. but I think I'll get a 500GB??


4) DDR3 memory:
Chances are you won't need more than 8GB for several years unless you do video editing, but you may at some point so that's your choice. That is $80 to $100 you could do something else with right now though like better speakers unless budget is no issue.


4) I do little video editing and some photo editing stuff.. not regular but yes like once a quarter or something like that.. also, in MSI compatibility website, the corsair with the aluminium heatsink is mentioned as compatible. I was initially going in for the g.skill ripjaws 1600mhz.. oh this reminds me of a question, if I put a RAM higher than 1600MHz, will I get any benefit? coz the processor supports only 1600Mhz..

and I guess this is a pretty far fledged question, but do you think that games will take advantage of DDR4? I personally don't think so. but just trying to be future proof..


5) Windows:
You don't mention an OS, but you'll want to get Windows 8.1 64-bit OEM (about $95) as well as Start8 ($5) likely. Don't get Windows 7, and if you thought you could transfer W7 you're likely wrong there unless it's a FULL version not OEM which I doubt.

5) I already got my windows 7.. i'm planning to formatt my SSD with the new build..

Out of curiosity....why? I've never been a big Windows fan (although I've had just about every iteration since 3.1), but I really like 7 more than just about anything out there - Mac included. I am holding out until Windows 9 at the soonest before an upgrade and would recommend that to anyone that listens.