First time budget build

Alrite.. For starters, the motherboard you're looking at does not support overclocking, which means you will not be able to take advantage of paying more for the 2500K. If you have no plans on overclocking, than you're fine with that board, but you might consider buying an i5-2400 or 3450 instead and save a few bucks.

Or alternatively, if you want to overclock you need either a Z77 or Z68 motherboard. Chipsets that start with an H or a B do not support overclocking.

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There are much better quality power supplies than the one you picked that are cheaper, like this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...


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You're spending more than you have to on the RAM.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

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64GB for an SSD is not a good idea. Between Windows7 and NTFS formatting, you will only have about 45GB left of space on it, considering a lot of games can easily take over 10GB for just one, unless you can afford at least a 128GB SSD, you're better off going traditional hard drive and forgetting about an SSD altogether. SSDs will not help you game better, nor will they give you better FPS rates, they merely make programs load faster.


What exactly is your final budget?

id be happy to spend about 1200 as i still need to buy a new monitor, but upgrading in the near future is a certainty

Well for far less on a simple stock/no OC config you could land a HD 7970 based rig ^^

thanks for the really detailed replies guys you've been hugely helpful

Yep u are welcomed and happy shopping ^^