How long will this build last me?

At least 3 - 4 years, the 7970 is an awesome GPU.

Yep. You should be good for at least 3 years even without switching out the GPU. Maybe in 2 years Xfire it if you're seeing performance suffer, since 7970s shouldn't be very expensive at that point.

Overall a very solid build.

It shows his memory is 1866, but the motherboard shows the fastest support being for 1600. Does this mean he is going to miss out on 266 memory speed?

Yes, theoretically, but it won't make any performance difference.

Why will it not affect the performance? What happens to that extra 266 when it crashes into the motherboard? lol

I mean, I guess it's going to operate fine for a 1600 speed mobo, but if he bought a mobo that supported 1866 RAM, wouldn't his system run faster?

Not really. There are benchmarks that show that there's really not much difference between performance of RAM at various speeds - most of the stuff over 1600 isn't worth it even if the MOBO supports it, and I really doubt that anyone would notice any difference above 1333 in real life conditions.

Here's a Tom's article from 2008 saying that there's no real noticeable difference in most applications (1-3%) between RAM at 800 and RAM at 1333: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-speed-tests,180...

Apparently Intel chips can't take advantage of faster than 1600 clock speeds anyway, though Llano chips can.

Here's an interesting article from Anandtech about RAM speed improvements versus price. Basically they conclude that there is some improvement with faster RAM, but you have to run specific benchmarks to see it and it is massively inconsistent between applications - there's a huge increase in Arkham City but less than 10% from top to bottom in Portal 2. In regular usage there would be no perceptible difference. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6372/memory-performance-1...

Nice! Thanks for the explanation and the informative articles.

Thanks for the feedback everyone