Building a desktop PC

[edyzmedieval]

Dearest Orgahs, I need your techy help!

I need to replace my old computer and replace it with a new one, custom built with components of my choice, and I'm looking to get the best performance for the games that are coming up (Shogun 2 Total War comes to mind the most, but not only) but also to keep it working for the next four-five years.

Here's the line up:

- case - Antec Tower 1200
- motherboard - ASUS P6X58D-E, IntelX58, LGA1366
- processor - Intel Quad Core i7 950 3.06GHZ
- HDD - Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB 10000rpm
- RAM memory - Corsair 8GB Triple Channel 1866MHZ
- video card - GIGABYTE nVIDIA GeForce GTX470 1.2GB
- processor cooler - Master Hyper 212 Plus
- power supply - Zalman ZM 1000HP 1000W
- sound card - ASUS Xonar D-1
- optical drive - LG DVD RW (don't need Blu Ray)

At this powerhouse I might need custom cooling to be honest, even if the case already comes with five ventilators included.

Any thoughts on this?
Your help would be greatly appreciated.

[Lemur]

A kilowatt power supply seems like overkill, given that you're running a single pro, single videocard and single HD. I'll bet you could get by with an 850 or 750 and still have juice for SLI if you ever wanted to go that way. I mean, hey, I'm all about overbuilding the infrastructure, but your PS seems a bit much.

[Raz]

Whilst I'm certainly not an expert, custom cooling I'd only really consider if you were going to be overclocking.
Chances are though, since it would shorten the life of your components and you want this to last for at least 4 years, you won't be overclocking at all.

5 stock fans should be plenty fine, especially if you drop the wattage as Lemur has said.

[Tellos Athenaios]

You don't need that big a PSU for that system, and unless you are doing something really weird you can probably even run this thing on stock coolers (albeit it would run hotter than if you used the aftermarket CPU cooler). I'm also kind of wondering why you would go for Nvidia if your aim is to be running the thing 4-5 years hence without much maintenance efforts. (You get more and more serious random [driver related] nonsense with Nvidia than you get with ATI, or at least that has been my subjective experience.) I guess it is worth pointing out that if you are not in love with the Raptor or something, you can get an SSD + data driver for similar price but better day to day performance (mainly because SSD's are much better at random read/writes as they do not need to seek all over the disk).

[edyzmedieval]

I scaled down my PSU to a 850W, possibly a Corsair AX850 as suggested on another forum. There's too much RAM so I'll stick with 6 for the moment, and I will get a cheaper HDD and a smaller SSD for the more important information to stock it in there. The video card will remain the same, I'm sticking to NVIDIA, I'm a fanboy. I'm not going to overclock until maybe later on, so indeed, custom cooling is a bit too much. I don't need to overclock, never needed to to be honest.

[Beskar]

Actually, I would hold off or consider changing some details:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11430069

Get a non-bios motherboard aka UEFI one instead.