I received the last parts yesterday and assembled them. I'll probably write some kind of review later with pictures, but thought I'd share my initial impression.
Background:
I didn't get a graphics card yet, as the Intel HD4600 works great for my gaming needs right now. I'll wait for Maxwell 20 nm and also get to know the situation inside my new chassis a bit better first. For the same reason I'm using the stock CPU fan right now, and will change it later.
As for the PSU, I went with the ST45SF-G rather than SeaSonic G360. After seeing some pictures of completed builds I realized that it would be really tight, and that a SFX PSU with modular cables could help quite a bit. I also got a discount so the price difference wasn't very big.
The chassis is a
Cooltek Coolcube (Rosewill Legacy V3).
First impressions:
I like the chassis so far, it's smaller than the others I considered and looks really nice. I find it quite tasteful with the brushed aluminium, the build quality seems nice, also considering the low price. The combined power and disk LED is cool. I can easily lift the assembled machine with one hand when the case is open. Assembly was easy.
It is pretty full inside, but I don't see why I couldn't add a graphics card if I choose one of the smaller ones. It would still have some air around it and should be fine with a fan of its own.
The SilverStone PSU feels awesome, from the box and manual to the unit and its cables it all radiates quality. The modular cables are nice, but might not actually make a huge difference. With only a CPU and one SSD, I still use 3 cables out of 5, and the Molex cable is long and has 3 connectors on it, out of which I only need one. Might just barely be worth the higher price. It's also worth noting that from the numbers I've seen, the cheap 300W Bronze model is more efficient than this 450W Gold model, for sub-100W loads where I guess I'll be most of the time, especially without a discrete graphics card.
With a full ATX PSU the cables would probably have been pressed against the side of the case.
The biggest problem is that the PSU fan is very loud. Even without a graphics card or even a mechanical disk, it's annoyingly obvious. It's a relatively comfortable blowing sound, but too loud. Much louder than the Intel stock CPU fan unless I max out the CPU. My wife who was sitting 1 meter away agrees that's very audible. I'm actually a bit disappointed in SilverStone here. Will try to replace the fan with a NoiseBlocker as many others have done, which will increase the price quite a bit.
The BIOS on the Asus Z97I is nice. Compared to other computers I've had there are MANY options, I can tweak everything here and it will take time to learn. For now I can say that the memory runs at 1.35V out of the box with the advertised timings, and the MB and CPU voltages are low too and automatically adjusted each second. CPU fan spins up each time I boot, then quickly goes down to under 900 RPM and becomes silent (next to the PSU anyway). An annoying thing is that almost every time I reset, the CPU FAN doesn't spin up quickly enough, and the BIOS pauses with a "CPU FAN error - press F1 blah blah". Maybe I can fix this by tweaking.
Unless people here say it's not worth it I'll probably upgrade to a Noctua L9i for better capacity at high loads, and a quieter boot.
As for performance, it subjectively feels like a decent upgrade. Compiling code, installing packages, indexing file systems etc are significantly faster. This makes sense since the CPU is much faster with twice as many cores, and I now have SATA 3.0 and a modern SSD drive instead of an early one at SATA 1 or 2.
I can play Dota 2 with higher settings on the HD4600, than on my old discrete laptop graphics card (Radeon 6470M).
Wow, a wall of text after just installing an OS on it...