Case: Nanoxia Deep Silence 1 (already Own)
Mobo: Asus Z87 Expert - $247
CPU: Intel i7-4770k - $340 - 55 = $285
CPU cooler: Corsair H90 - $80
CPU TIM: Gelid GC-Extreme (already own)
GPU: MSI N780 GTX 780 - $660
RAM: Crucial Ballistix Tactical 1600Mhz 1.35V 8-8-8-24 Low Profile - $140
PSU: Seasonic SS-660XP - $133
SSD: 512GB Samsung 840 Pro - $470
HDD: 4TB Western Digital SE - $280
BD-R: 16x LG Drive (Free from my Dad or I wouldn't even use a disc drive)
Card Reader: AFT PRO 57U (Already own)

Total: $2295


The motherboard and the i7-4770k have a combo deal which takes 55 dollars off the price which is the reason I'm taking that instead of the i5. I will be undervolting the CPU and running at stock. Therefore the corsair h90 will be on its slowest speed as that will be more than enough cooling for an undervolted chip. I may replace any or all of the stock fans if I'm not happy with any of them. Was thinking of going with a fanless psu but it makes more sense to go with the 660 and the fan will only come on during gaming so i agree with CA_Steve the 660 is a better choice and less heat will leak into the case. Definitely down to hear some opinions before I buy all the parts. I typically like to buy all the parts at once so if anything is broken I can have newegg send me a new one within the 30 day window.

I've read good things about the MSI GPU's but I'm not totally sure which 780 is the best. I've never had a bad crucial ram stick in my life so I'm happy with that choice the lower voltage should shave a little heat and power usage from the system. I was budgeting for a 1TB SSD but I realized I can get a 512GB SSD 840 pro for less and 512GB is still enough for everything I want to install while still leaving close to 50% of the SSD free to keep performance at max. I know there are cheaper HDD's out there but this is the component I seem to have the worst luck with. I've had many hard drives fail on me so I wanted a solid 5 year warranty. I also have a Router with 2x 3TB drives attached to it. It's not the fastest transfer speed like 30MB/sec but it's fine for storing blu ray rips and flac audio. My router is a wireless router but I use 1gbit ethernet to connect to my desktop.

So yeah any opinions welcome. I'll be keeping this till skylake than selling it off and making a new one. It is only the funnest thing to do ever right guys?

[Mod: it has several moving parts, so it cannot be silent; but it can be very quiet.]

I like most of the choices, specially the N780. But i think if you are building as quiet as possible, i would change a couple of things

I dont like any of the AIO watercooling kits for making a silent build, i do think you can make watercooling very quiet, but not with AIO. All this entry level coolers can be matched by any of the Twin tower coolers, pretty much equal in price and better noise levels, Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E would be my first pic if i were looking for a high end air cooler, SPCR reviewed the past iteration and came out really well, Thermalright Silver Arrow Dual 14cm Fan Cooler. Or if you dont like massive twin towers, you could go with something like Noctua NH-U14S $73 free shpping, the fan NF-A15 PWM is pretty solid, i just bought one for testing, ran it in FanXpert2 on CPU_FAN header,



Another option if you want to save some $$$ is Thermalright HR-02 Macho $55 free shipping, reviewed by SPCR Thermalright HR-02 Macho Quiet/Fanless Cooler.

HDD and fans are the biggest source of noise, so choosing the right hdd is a must for a quiet build, you have chosen very good components elsewhere, dont let the hdd ruin it. One of the most recent reviews on SPCR on hdds is Western Digital Red 3TB & 1TB Hard Drives. WD green also been one of the most recommended and used among SPCR fellows. Now if you need 4tb then consider Seagate Desktop HDD.15 ST4000DM000 4TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive, not the most quiet drive i have had, but its pretty decent and my choice for 4tb.

I've had 2 seagate drives die on me and a wd green drive die on me. I really want a 5 year warranty drive in there I hate losing my data. I also hate losing half my capacity to raid 1, blu ray disc images are not small so I need a reliable drive but I can't give up capacity for raid 1. The WD SE drives are that loud? Do you have to use 5.4k rpm drives or its too loud? I guess I could live with the red but I really want to use 4TB drives inside the tower. It completely ruins all my seeded torrents when a drive dies then I have to waste tons of ratio getting the stuff back.. The cooler doesn't matter to me much i'm gonna be running the cpu undervolted and at stock so I rly dont need a big heavy double tower cooler. I don't want a bunch of dead weight on my motherboard. One of the smaller lighter noctua heatsinks i could go for no problem. It's not like i'm overclocking. Honestly even the standard intel cooler with a better fan on it would probably even be enough but I won't do that.

The bigger the cooler the easier is to cool the CPU, so the less you will need the fan to ramp up, but some dont like big coolers, i just dislike more noise, so this is up to you.

The best thing you can for not losing your data is to backup, an external 4tb should do the trick, just keep a quiet one inside, and backup frecuently. I know you don't like seagate, but this is the one that lot of people tear down when prices went up on hdds and was pretty decent, Seagate Backup Plus 4 TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive STCA4000100, there are other options though, but none of the externals have much warranty, i believe a year, but this is just to do backups.

Either way have you consider a seeding server, personally i wouldnt use my gaming PC for seeding, it consumes way to much power for 24/7, its cheaper imo to either get a seeding server (they are as low as $6 and you can keep huge ratios), or Server like Synology with atoms that can seed and download and have huge amount of storage (depending on the model), and control it and manage it from your gaming pc, its really easy.

You are aware that the warranty only kicks in AFTER your precious HDD is crashed and all your data is blown into oblivion? And RAID1 is just a technique to ensure max. availability, nothing that spares you from doing backups?

I cannot understand there are people willing to spend a grand on a PC system but have no budget whatsoever to do/plan/keep a backup.(?)

Do you have apps that require 16GB of RAM and the 512GB SSD? The SSD size seems overkill if you have an HDD.

A couple more economic questions:

- is there some feature on the Expert board that you need versus some of the (way) cheaper Asus boards?
- What's driving the need for the GTX 780? gaming with 3 monitors? Gaming at high resolution (>>1080p)?

I have a korean 30" 2560x1600 monitor and I want to eventually get a PLP with 1600x1200 monitors on the side. For now I'll be pushing 2560x1600. I want the thunderbolt port. I like the interface it is extremely versatile I will most likely end up connecting a large amount of storage to it. To the guy saying just backup the data. I keep a huge collection of blu ray disc images (the entire disc) and huge collection of FLAC audio. Any space I have gets used up for files. I can't afford to double it. Ive already got almost 10TB full of data. I do not pay for electricity so the cost of power leaving my PC run 24/7 doesn't bother me. I am choosing the 512GB size for the SSD because I want 50% of it free at all times to keep it running at its maximum throughput. I know thats overkill but I will easily use 200GB and 256GB is cutting it too close. I want 16GB of ram because I read an article where with 16gb+ of ram there were much less writes to the SSD extending it's longevity. I also like to run some of my games on a ram disk it actually provides advantages in the races as the levels load incredibly fast giving me that slight edge on every 1 else. And I want to be able to easily expand to 32GB later down the road if I want to.

I know I could greatly cut the cost changing a few things with minimal impact on the performance but I dont look at it as that much a loss. When I sell the build after skylake comes out I'll get a large portion of the money back. I know tons of people on campus and I simply place an add on the community board in campus and get good money for my builds. I've sold a bunch of systems and people kinda know me as a good system builder so it's easy for me to get top dollar back on the resale, so a lot of the money will come back. Just as it did on my corsair 550d ivy bridge build.

Another reason I chose the 780 is I despise multi gpu setups. They just suck in general imo. So I need 1 good strong gpu.

And is it really going to be that hard to cool a stock undervolted 4770k? I really don't see the need for a huge double tower. I like that single tower with the 140mm noctua fan. I can run that fan at it's lowest setting and my undervolted chip should be nice and cool.

It's kind of a hobby of mine. I like building pc's selling them and building again. I do it for the whole process of building pc's more then anything. I enjoy it like someone would enjoy golfing or something.

Is the WD SE really that big a noise hog? What other high reliable enterprise class drive at 4TB would you suggest over that if it's so noisy?

Changing the cooler to the noctua nhu14. not super huge and a slow moving 140mm fan on that tower should be plenty for an undervolted stock chip. You can even get the noctua fan up to a medium speed with very little to no noise if need be or i can add 2 and run on only 5 volts to each 1.

Are the MSI gtx 780's the undisputed champs of noise output for that card? I'd prefer not to get one of those big heavy bulky aftermarket coolers as I said I don't like putting lots of weight on the mobo.

Just run FanXpert2 it will tune all your fans, you should get the same low speeds as the pic i posted in the previous post. If you dont like Asus AI SUITE III, you can also use the bios to control it, here is a pic of it being ran on CPU_FAN header,



This is very hard to say, as the custom coolers started to show up last month, and not that many here buy high end cards. The Asus DirectCUII was at first aimed for better temps than noise, in the techpowerup review, where they said it was not quiet, asus send them another vbios that has the fan profiles much lower, ending up with a quieter card. From what i read MSI seems the quietest of all the custom cooler cards atm, weather its good enough for SPCR lvls idk, but if i were buying another, i would probably go with MSI, or maybe even asus if with the new vbios. What i wouldnt do is go with aftermarket on the GTX780, its buggy with both Artic Cooling Accelero III Extreme and Prolimatek MK26, unless you like to control your fans manually with a fan controller.

Thanks for the background info and the PC use.

I agree with all your points except the 'more RAM will increase SSD longevity'. While it might lessen the writes (depending on how you set things up), I think it's just a drop of water in a lake. Hardware.info did a nice SSD torture/longevity test. Worth reading. Tech Report just started theirs with a few more SSDs.

A lot of people tend to horrendously overspec their builds and end up wasting lots of $'s. I try to talk them off of the monetary ledge.

Cooler: Undervolted, stock you could easily drop down to the NH-U12S.

Since you going with GTX780 with aftermarket, might be worth checking GTX 780 Non-reference Comparison, no noise comparision though, but still nice to see all those cards together.

It probably doesn't matter much which version i get. The only time the card will even ramp its fans up is when im gaming. So when I get headphones on gaming I could have the crappiest cooler with like 4 60mm fans buzzing at 2500 rpm and I still wouldn't hear it. So MSI card should be fine even though it a power sucking 780 i wont hear it through my headphones and then when im just on the desktop the fans will barely be moving or not moving at all.

Edit: Wow that combo deal didn't last fast. Thank god I ordered the mobo and cpu yesterday. Today the deal is already gone. I basically got a 4770k for only 45 dollars over the i5-4670k. Still need to order the GPU and SSD couldn't afford to buy those just yet but I can still get the pc running and be able to check all the components before my 30 day window is gone. I want the msi lightning gtx 780 anyways.

Well I ordered all the parts but the gpu and the ssd for now. I had to goto amazon to get the Noctua NH-U14S. Check out the new msi lightning gtx 780 it's pretty nice.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/MSI-GeForce-GTX-780-3GB-Lightning-Graphics-Card-Review/Overclocking-and-Closi

It is kinda insane just the gpu and ssd is half the cost of the build. I might drop the ssd to 256GB. If i put 200GB on a 256GB SSD do you think the performance will go down much? May also save some money and get the msi lightning gtx 770. If I make those 2 moves I save like 500 dollars. I think it might be the smart thing to do.

How well does the 770 handle 2560x1600? Can I justify spending an extra 300 for the gtx 780 @ 2560x1600?

You can benchmark the difference, but in normal usage you won't be able to detect the difference. For the average human being a system has to be roughly 20% faster to see any difference. Changing SSD won't give or take more than a few percent of total system performance.



You could. But if it was my money, i'd save the 300$ and would be willing to reduce bling-bling for some frame rates.

SSD there are ways to save some, specially turn off hybernation and system restore, it shoudl give you 10-20gb. Consider also Samsung 840EVO, its cheaper and getting good reviews.

The GTX780 is about 20-25% faster than GTX770. Depends on the game you play, resolution and quiality you want to drive it. The GTX770 is a GTX680 with better vram, slightly faster but not by much, but this was the best gpu from nvidia last year and there were lots of people playing at 1440p, i was playing 1440p on gtx580 and still was fine, but again depends on the games you plan on playing and the settings you want to run.

Techpowerup gfx card summary at 2560x1600

Stock GTX 770 vs 780 is maybe 20% less fps for 50% less cost and you still get playable framerates with the eye candy turned on...not 60+ for the more intensive games, but playable...and you can always turn down some of the eye candy. That MSI Gaming review is here.

I don't think the 780 is worth the $'s unless you've got money to burn.

SSDs: Short answer: If you overprovision, then no, you won't notice the diff.

Anandtech did a decent look at I/O performance consistency when the SSD is being hammered with random reads/writes. If you overprovision, you get more consistant results. You can see how the 840 Pro does in this review and this one. Here's the 840 Evo review. Upside is great performance, cheaper than the 840 Pro, and Samsung's excellent track record. Downside is it's only been out for a month and it's a new controller...so, no history.

You don't really say what's going to be on the SSD...and whether everything you want to put on it requires 840 Pro level of performance.

I'm gonna get the MSI gtx 770 lightning. It's one of if not the fastest gtx 770 and it saves me 250. Or maybe the regular msi gtx n770 TF

Newegg has a 20 dollar off samsung 840 pro deal going on so the 256GB 840 pro is only 37 dollars more than the 250GB 840 Evo. 37 dollars is pretty small difference plus its 6GB more. And the 250 evo has like 30k less write iops than the 840 pro.

I'll be installing about 175 GB worth of games on the SSD. And video transcoding software. And photoshop. And of course the OS. Like im gonna be pushing an almost full SSD.

It's $240 for the 256GB 840 pro or $360 for a 500GB evo. I'm feelin kinda iffy on the 256GB. I will have no room for future expansion on a 256GB drive. $120 dollars to gain an extra 250GB isn't that bad a deal right? I think I'm leaning towards a $360 dollar 500GB Samsung Evo. I'm gonna need more space for future games. Though I could get the 256GB 840 pro and then add another one later on down the road. What's the better move you think? Spend $360 and get the 500GB I need or spend $240 and get 256GB now and then spend another $240 later on but that equals $480 when I could get that same space with only $360.

Does the msi lightning have a bigger radiator or better fans than the regular msi gamer n770 TF? Or is it strictly just better power delivery and higher clocks with the same radiator and same fans? If it's got the same radiator area and the same fans I'll just get the regular msi gamer gtx 770. Or is the Asus with the new vbios the best choice now, they both look pretty neck and neck? Also with 2560x1600 does having 4GB of Vram make a difference at all i mean since the ps4 is going to have 8GB of memory with at least 5 GB addressable for the games I'm wondering if we are going to start needing the 4GB gpu's now. Is it worth getting a second much lower power geforce strictly for physics calculations?

I'm going to be ordering either the SSD (if there is a sale deadline) or most likely the GPU on friday. Since the computer will be kinda useless without the GPU I want to get that first, unless a special deal pops up on the 840 evo. I think I want the 500GB Samsung evo for like $364 with shipping.

Some of my games will be running off a ram disk, most notably path of exile. When you are in a 3 hour race or what not the quicker each instance loads the few more seconds you gain on each person which can be the difference in you having the highest xp after time is up or someone else.

Now the fun begins, can't wait to start building and tweaking. I kinda wish I woulda went with the raven rv02 case now that I look back at it. I really like the unique way the board sits and gives easier access to the ports and the cool air flows with the natural convection of heat. Guess I'll try that when skylake comes out.

So to sum up my questions:
-MSI Lightning gtx 770 (does it have a larger radiator and better fans) or the MSI Gamer GTX N770 TF ($40 cheaper same radiator and fans as lightning or no?) or the Asus DirectCUII (with new Vbios)
-Due to the consoles having more ram available to GPU and my resolution of 2560x1600 should I pony up for the 4GB Vram cards?
-Samsung 500GB 840 Evo at $360 or Samsung 256GB 840 pro at $240 (then later down the line another 840 pro for $480 total for 512GB)
-And just to be sure say a game takes up 8GB will 16GB of ram be enough to use half as a ram disk? I'm sure it is many people run off 8GB ram systems just want to be sure. That's why I went with 2x8GB, so I can easily expand to 32GB if I want to. I got the 1.35v 1600Mhz 8-8-8-24 Low Profile Crucial ram just to be sure there is no heatsink issues.

See the thing is I play games with headphones on. So I'm not sure it even matters if the video card sounds like a hair dryer at full load I won't hear crap through my headphones. And when I'm just browsing the web and doing light stuff the gpu fan will barely move or not move at all. I can either get the MSI lightning gtx 770 with 2GB of Vram for $440 (it's $770 for the gtx 780 lightning a whopping $330 over the already higher end of the spectrum for gtx 770's, that's just a little too crazy) or the MSI gaming with 2GB for $400 (only $40 cheaper) or the MSI gaming with 4GB for $480 ($40 more than the lightning). Are the consoles going to make 4GB Vram necessary?

Maybe I'm more sensitive than most or maybe it was all in my head, but I started noticing a decline in performance round about the time my SSD got ~50% full. It didn't become truly bothersome until my drive passed ~85%, though, so YMMV.

EDIT: Oops. Missed that last post about how you don't care about GPU noise. Go ahead and disregard the rest.

Also, I've found the biggest source of system noise to be GPU coolers. They produce more heat than any other component and their st00pid form-factor mandates extremely sub-optimal heatsink/fan arrangements. I've yet to meet a gaming-grade GPU that didn't need an aftermarket cooler to make it acceptably quiet. Choices are limited and expensive, alas, but they can often be reused through multiple upgrade cycles and allow you to buy a cheaper GPU with a crappier stock cooler.

If you're looking for a recommendation for an aftermarket GPU cooler, I'd say the Prolimatech Mk.26 is a pretty good bet, so long as you've got the room for it in your case. You aren't likely to run into a card it won't fit on or overclocks too hot for it to handle. I put one on my 6950 and the only reason I have a fan on it at all is to cool the VRMs.

Do you really play 175GB worth of games during the week? Why not use the HDD to store games that are on hiatus and then move them over to the SSD as needed? Also, the sole benefit to SSD over HDD in games is the load time, which is sequential read...and really, you won't tell the difference in load times between any recent SSD.

pain in the ass to move games back and forth. Also means more unnecessary writes. And in path of exile they have race leagues where you get a certain amount of time to see how far you can level your character and you get points for how high u finish at the top. People install the game on a ram disk to get super fast load times so every area you switch into you start killing stuff that much faster. That's 1 game i gotta install on a ram disk for maximum effectiveness. If i cut back and get the 770 which saves me a good chunk of cash i can easily afford the extra 120 dollars for double the SSD space. I mean 360 for 500GB is pretty damn good.

If your system has been noticable slower, it might be caused by your SSD (controller, firmware etc.). But i have to admit it could be caused from filling up your SSD. Modern OS with Trim support should not show any signs of slowdown over time.

Would anyone be interested in a photo log of me building my system. I'll be building it this weekend minus the gpu and ssd. I've narrowed down my gpu to either the 2GB msi lightning GTX 770 for 440 or the 4GB msi gamer gtx 770 for 480. I'll be gaming at 2560x1600 and the next gen consoles will be using 4gb+ of gddr5 ram for the video. Will I be better off with the 4GB msi gamer gtx 770 or the 2GB msi lightning gtx 770? There is no 4gb lightning version. Ordering gpu tomorrow. I'm leaning towards the msi gamer with 4GB because all the next gen consoles are going to be using 4GB of ram or more. It's clock isn't much lower than the lightnings and i won't be overclocking. the 4gb msi gamer is 80 more than the 2GB msi gamer. Will the next gen consoles have a big enough impact to warrant the 4gb version? Need opinions asap.

Look at your current/near term games. Do they use >2GB (I know Skyrim can with some of the downloadable high texture packs)?

I don't know if console ported games will drive higher than 2GB in the next 2 years or not.

My GTX780 i never seen it pass 2gb on 2560x1440, there are games that will, but i just dont play them, LOL takes like 1gb at the most, SC2 like 1.2gb from what i have tested. But if you plan to play games like Skyrim that loads on vram all the mods, then go ahead and go for the 4gb, there are people have have pass that on that game, i personally want to play Elder Scroles Online, so maybe ill need more memory, but atm i think 3gb is fine, unless you go into 4k i doubt ill use it on most games.

Just a though, not telling you to drop MSi, but since the GTX770 is GTX680 with faster vram, SPCR did test ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II OC, got the editors choice but this is triple slot card not the same cooler that comes with the GTX770 DCUII, the SCPR did test the dual slot DCUII, ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II, and also got the editors choice.... so idk, i would research reviews of the GTX770 DCUII to see if its worth it with the MSI.

Well I kinda made an impulse purchase off of craigslist. So no GPU for another 2 weeks. A dell u3014 ad came up for 650 dollars. There was a scratch on the frame but the screen was totally flawless. Came with all the papers, manuals, calibration report, even the original box and display port cable. I thought my korean monitor was pretty accurate but it looks totally blue compared to the super accurate dell. Not only that but the dell gives off practically no heat the korean monitor runs extremely much hotter compared to the dell. I think the dell is running much more efficiently. If anyone is interested in buying my korean monitor it's a crossover 3010T with the converter plug accepts 100 volts to 240 volts. The stand swivels and pivots and tilts and rises. Paid 550 for it brand new. Zero dead or stuck pixels. Some light bleed along the edges. No scuffs or scratches anywhere. They are going for 700 new on ebay now. I can place it on ebay if anyone is interested. I would let it go for 400 + shipping + all ebay and paypal fees. This will allow me to get my gpu now instead of 2 weeks. I've named all the flaws with it and it's a great value and I enjoyed it very much but it really doesn't compare well to the dell.

I talked the guy on craigslist down to 580. Told him I had to drive a lot further than what i really did. Gotta use tough tactics to negotiate. How can you pass up a dell u3014 with its awesome calibration and very minimal light bleed for only 580? Another reason this really appealed to me is now when I eventually go 20" 1200X1600 Portrait on the 2 sides and 30 inch 2560x1600 landscape in the middle they will all be matching brand, all 3 dell. The bezel is thinner on the dells as well.

As far as getting the gtx 680 I'd rather not. The main bottleneck on it was the memory bandwidth so the faster memory on the card is really useful. I'm going to get the 2GB MSI gamer n770. Just can't afford the extra 80 dollars for 4GB.

I am returning the WD SE drive. I've changed my plans and decided I don't want a HDD inside the PC. Going to use my 128GB micron c300 SSD and my 2x 3TB WD red drives connected via usb 2.0 to my router in the immediate future. I will eventually bite the bullet and get a NAs system. Until then I will use the samsung 500GB evo and put the c300 back in my laptop. And the 6TB connected to my router (the drives connected via usb to router hamper the performance by a large margin). I've tried to avoid spending the money on a proper nas but it really is the only way to get silent mass storage. I don't know much about NAS's. All I really know is they are a dedicated storage computer that you connect to your router via ethernet which you can then access with any other PC connected to the same router and configured through a web interface. But there are so many different features I know nothing about. But I'll start another thread for that. But since I am skipping a PC upgrade I'll be able to get a really really nice and BIG BIG nas. Somewhere between a 6-8 bay nas. I definitely want a quality hardware raid controller for some RAID 5 action so I atleast have some protection if 1 drive fails. Hopefully in the next 12-16 months western digital releases a 4TB red drive.

Won't be able to start building it till next Saturday, still don't have all the parts in yet.

I will make a photo log of the build with photos step by step of the entire process. This gives me an excuse to test the limits of my nokia 1020's bad ass camera.


Edit: Well my Asus board has the USB 3.0 bug. I am going to call newegg and explain they sold me faulty hardware. I will weasel out of the restocking fee watch and see. I'll simply say I will gladly just take store credit instead of my credit card being credited. Main reason for this is Asus is about to release a new motherboard with thunderbolt 2.0. It is 120 more than the expert but it will also be guaranteed no usb 3.0 bug.

Warning to everyone Asus z87 expert boards at newegg are not updated yet.

Sorry guys my build is on hold for now. I am waiting for the Asus Z87 deluxe/quad with 2 thunderbolt 2.0 ports. But as soon as possible I will have a build log for everyone. And if anyone wants to build one like me I will be glad to answer any questions. Just get your nanoxia deep silence case 1 ASAP cause the stock is always poor on them.

Ready to get started on this build again. Scored an open box but unused Asus Z87 Deluxe for 210 including shipping on ebay. And it is the proper updated board without the bug.

Already purchased
Nanoxia DS 1 case
Asus Z87 Deluxe mobo
Mushkin Blackline 1.35V 1866Mhz 2x8GB ram
i5-4670k cpu
Gelid GC extreme TIM
Noctua U14s Heatsink
Seasonic SS-660xp2 psu
16x LG BD-R Optical drive
AFT Pro 57u Card reader

I'm in the home stretch. All I need is my solid state drive and my graphics card. Not going to bother upgrading my bulk storage hard drives yet. Just going to wait and get a NAS system next year. I did change a few components compared to my original plans. Basically to save money and take advantage of good deals I found. Ditched the closed loop cooler idea as I can get a quieter build on air with a quality fan like the noctua and as ill be undervolting it will more then suffice for the cooling and it was cheaper. Changed the ram cause it was only 110 30 dollars cheaper. Changed the CPU got an open box i5 for 195 with shipping on ebay. Saved myself hundreds of dollars and haven't really lost any performance.

You guys can bet I was VERY thrilled with the 150 dollar price cut to the gtx 780. 510 for an MSI Gaming N780 instead of the 660 I was going to have to pay *rejoices* Samsung 840 pro 512GB has gotten a bit cheaper too 420 instead of 470. What a difference 2 months makes. Spent 400 dollars less then i was planning to, 2000 dollar build (excluding HDD) morphed into a 1600 dollar build (excluding HDD). I may experiment with different fans for the case so the actual savings may end up being less than 400 if I'm not happy with the acoustics of the stock fans on the nanoxia.

I can feel that PC building fever. Quite pumped to get this thing in action. Hope it is as quiet as I expect it to be.

Well seems like nice choices on all components, if you can share some pics of it, and if you want, your personal experience with the components.

The pics may end up pretty bad. My brother borrowed my Sony R1 for his trip and I'm using a piece of crap phone from walmart that i paid 19.99 for it's not android dont even know what OS it is and it has a 3 megapixel camera that needs a spotlight to function properly. I'm waiting for the Nexus 5 to release, Snapdragon 800 5" 1920x1080 8MP with OIS and 349 dollars. Flagship specs that equal phones costing 650, can;t beat it. My galaxy s3 got wet and broke

[the only moving parts will be the fans, im not putting in the mechanical HDD, when the comp is idle/2d/light usage i do expect it to be silent, that's the goal] If I have to upgrade the case fans to noctuas and use fan expert 2 software to ramp them down to 300 rpm or so i will. I'm undervolting the cpu as low as i can so the low fan speed should be plenty for everything but high load/gaming and when im gaming i have headphones on so who cares how loud it is. I think I can prove the mod wrong hopefully.

I'll be interested to see what thunderbolt devices you would end up getting and using..

There are some Thunderbolt external drives/arrays out there, but you're still going to be limited by the read/write speed of the drive, so USB3.0 would not be any slower in a real world test. I have an HD Video Capture unit that's Thunderbolt, but I don't use it often. Outside of that, Thunderbolt is the black sheep of the family. It's really damn fast, pretty versatile, but largely unused. I thought I would wait for it on my most recent build, but 10 months later, I can't say it would have been worth the wait. I'd be interested to know your thoughts on that. Nearly bought the Gigabyte board that had dual Thunderbolt back in January, and then took a turn for Dual Xeons, and I don't regret it.

I'm guessing for a NAS, you'll be doing another build, for the RAID support, and not getting a simpler NAS unit? With the machine on all the time, you could just as easily use a thunderbolt enclosure, software RAID, and make it a network share. Lot cheaper than a second computer going. Just some thoughts.

It's an impressive machine, but I think you could have squeezed the budget down even more and foregone things like Thunderbolt and gone mATX, and still gotten comparable performance for what you're looking for. I work at a computer shop, and many of my customers want the most for the least, so I'm just used to looking at things that way. Hope you like the build!