The system is together and running well. Prime95 temps don't exceed 65C (+40C over ambient.) I had to get her a EVGA 770 GTX 2GB because the 4 GB's would not have been delivered in time. I am surprised that the 3.4GHz Haswell i4670k in the box will overclock itself as needed to 3.8GHz. I guess that'...

Hmm, that's a good point. I hadn't thought about a UPS for her. Thanks for the idea.

Well shoot the mobo bundle's no longer available from Newegg. Sadly, I didn't see a time limit on it.

So should I try to get the ASUS PRO C2 board and ignore the boot problems people have had, or try for a MSI mobo? Got any suggestions?

Raid is only an uptime tool, not a true backup, personally im against having much mechanical hdds inside a PC (unless its a storage server), what i would go is go with 1 mechancial for storage and get a external USB3 hdd to do backups. Now a days there are very small just powered by usb3 slot, like...

For 2560 or dual monitor setup I would recommned a 4GB card for future proofing. Games designed For XBone or PS4 will use higher resolution textures and their PC ports will benefit from more VRAM. Currently there are only a few titles which use more than 2GB at 1920X1080: Battlefield 3, Max Payne 3...

The Noctua NH-U9B SE2 is an older design of CPU cooler which uses 3 pin voltage control fans. Under motherboard control this limits the minimum speed at which the fans can run. PWM fans can run at lower speeds, your choice of motherboard has a PWM CPU fan header so the NH-U12S which comes with a PW...

Good point about the 770 vs. 760. $140 price difference there. I tend to buy the x70 cards from Nvidia as they've remained more than fast enough until it's time to replace the desktop (roughly every 3.5 years for me.) I'll ask her if she's planning to upgrade to a 2560 x 1440 or bigger monitor anyti...

Since she's attending grad school, reliability is important. The system needs to be reasonably quiet. I've been informed about the Z87 USB3 issues, but am more concerned about multiple reports with booting issues on the ASUS Z87-PRO, which is why I didn't select it. I'd be delighted if Gigabyte is g...

The i3-3220 can be had for $130, so you're paying $85 extra on this hypothetical. I'd save my money for some flowers. ;) I was thinking you might also prefer a PSU like the Seasonic G-360 to save yourself another $100, as I think the power draw of the system will be more like 150W at full burn. Wel...

Looks like I'll need to go to WD Red drives -- the WD Black drives don't support TLER ("time-limited error recovery" as I just found out) so aren't recommended for RAID setups. Good point about the PSU fan -- so basically the only noise will be the 2 fans on the CPU cooler plus the disk drives. I'll...

The apps will be Chrome, MS Word, Outlook, Photoshop Essentials, Dreamweaver, and maybe a 3D game like Lord of the Rings Online. Her current GPU (which she's fine with) is something like a 6600, approximately 5x slower than the 7750 at a guess. No video editing, no high end computing tasks like Fold...

I'm building a new PC desktop for my wife as a Christmas present. She's a former musician and needs a quiet computer. She needs a fair amount of reliable disk space, and tends to leave lots of applications on her desktop (hence the 16GB RAM to allow her to switch applications quickly.) The environme...