So the past few days of mine have been spent doing some research on computers. I'm trying to get an idea of what I want, and what will work best for me.

After some online building, here's the summary :

CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-2500K 3.30 GHz 6M Intel Smart Cache LGA1155 (All Venom OC Certified)
HDD: 1TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 32MB Cache 7200RPM HDD (Single Hard Drive)
MEMORY: 4GB (2GBx2) DDR3/1333MHz Dual Channel Memory [-37] (Corsair or Major Brand)
MOTHERBOARD: * [CrossFireX] GigaByte GA-Z68A-D3-B3 Intel Z68 Chipset DDR3 ATX Mainboard w/ Intel Smart Response Technology & 7.1 Dolby Home Theater Audio, GbLAN, USB3.0, 2x SATA-III RAID, 2 Gen2 PCIe, 3 PCIe X1 & 2 PCI (All Venom OC Certified)
SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB 16X PCIe Video Card [+123] (Major Brand Powered by NVIDIA)


In the end, this will come out to roughly 800 USD.

So what do you guys think?
See any major problems? Pros and cons?

Thanks

Every thing looks good.
The only problem. That i5 might bottleneck you're 460 though.

Throw a soundcard in there, you'll thank me later. [Make sure you have a good set of speakers though.]

I can't really see a bottleneck though. Looks fine to me.

could save yourself alot of money by going for phenom 6 core and ati 5870. that's what i'm running and i'm chuffed to bits

oh also, why not take advantage of all that bandwidth on the sata and go raid 0 on the hardrives with smaller capacity. i boot windows 7 in about 14 secs after bios screen

Hmm.. If you can swing another $90-$100 I'd go with an Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz processor, it's performance vs the i5 is worth it if you do any gaming or more cpu intensive tasks.

And +1 to what Broonie said, I'd consider a soundcard, even aside from the obvious, will help in games that have a lot of audio and are cpu limited.

As far as the raid0 idea.. I personally go for reliability over performance on this aspect, having two drives in raid0 might be faster but if one fails data on both is lost. I do however run a 150-300GB 10K rpm Raptor for my os drive, keeps startups etc speedy while having 7200rpm drives for storage.


Looks like a nice build so far.

Yeah, I thought about getting an i7, but I'd like to keep it $800-$900 if possible.
My main goal is to be able to run minecraft smoothly, as well as high end games like the new Battlefield.

moved away from intel myself, AMD seems to have more bang for my buck.

One of these upcoming days, AMD will have their new Bulldozer CPU's (they sound a lot faster then what they have now), and the price of the current batch of processors will go down