Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Your loss.


The current gen Haswell parts are notoriously unreliable for overclocking, and it is nowhere near as productive to try than with previous (first/second gen) i5/i7 parts. The poor quality thermal compound and already high speeds limit your headroom to perhaps 20-25% at most vs. the, say. 40%+ you could easily get with 1st-gen i7 parts.

But I agree with the overall sentiment, by the time you "need" to push that extra 20% out of old parts it's about time for a new PC anyway. Currently I have an i7 920 at 4Ghz and see no need for a new CPU as even Crysis 3 plays on max settings and full resolution at a decent 45fps.

When I "had" to overclock my (now 8 years old) Athlon64 x2 CPU the extra electricity needed even for an additional 10% overclock would have bought me a new i3 in a year.


I don't see any reasoning behind getting the i7 for virtual machines. The i5 has all the virtualization extensions already and costs considerably less, getting an i7 is just a waste when it offers nothing when it comes to virtualization the i5 doesn't already have.

Furthermore - it seems even more of a waste when you consider with 8GB RAM you'll barely be able to run any virtual machines while gaming. My suggestion - ditch the i7. If you want VMs get more RAM instead of the pointless CPU.

Motherboard - a bit overboard if you ask me, plus so is the cooler. I prefer to use stock coolers personally when not overclocking because they're reliable, efficient and quiet and guaranteed to do the job properly. After all, most HP, Dell, etc. PCs are shipped with stock coolers and you don't see people complaining about noise much these days.

Storage - modern Intel chipsets have hybrid storage built in. I'd save some money and get a smaller SSD and set up automatic caching via your motherboard. That way frequently accessed data is stored on the SSD and everything else on the HDD - and the transition is managed automatically.

Graphics card - a bit overpriced IMO. The Radeon R9 290 is practically as fast as a 780 and costs less than your 770. It outperforms the 770 in every way except noise and can be had for £266 if you're lucky.

Originally Posted by DocDutch

Damien again why looking at all different places it will be cheaper to order from 1 shop. You would probably save close to 100 quid on delivery charges