Phalanx108

The only one i can really agree on with you there is Nero. Mainly out of personal tastes, save for avicii's case. Used to not mind his stuff, until i found out how much of a massive rip he is.

Sweet as! Just a plea: disable any ping kickers if you have them. I'm in Australia and all the AU-NZ servers are filled with nothing but scunge. In terms of players, that is.

Shooting. I can nail anything from a cow to a sparrow at 500m. Something not many female people can do.

Well, there isnt any drawbacks per se, the FX CPU's are actually quite the opposite. They just arent good enough to justify paying what you do for them though. NOTE: I'm not saying that OP shouldnt buy the PC at all, its pretty decent.

True, but I'm talking bottlenecks here. Even if it had a 7990 for example, the CPU MAY end up holding the system back.

I'd avoid this one. There isnt too much support for the 8 core processors.

Well, you learn something every day I guess. I can honestly say I had no idea. In regards to the Zalman CPU cooler, this was the one I was referencing. http://www.zalman.com/ENG/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=162 Good in reliability, in that it still works today, but it was nowhere near a stellar cooler. As i said above, it seemed to glue dust into itself, in such a bad way that even a compressed air canister had trouble getting it out :\ It had put me into a mindset of "first and last" for Zalman coolers, but it looks like I'll be considering them again from now on.

RE CPU cooler: I have never followed Zalman at all since way back when. They used to be abhorrently loud and did a better job showing off how much dust was in your case than cooling, but its good to see they seem to be changing that. Oh, as for the grease, its mainly $10 because you can use the same tube many times. Ive used the tube sitting on my desk 4 times, and its just below half empty at a fair estimate. RE PSU: Brand name is no reason to shut down a particular choice. Seasonic arent even around where I live, they dont ship here, so I've barely even heard of them. I only chose that particular one because it has served the store i work at for many a labourous overclocking session, without even the slightest of "the awful smell".

+1 on staying at 8gb. You dont need 16gb worth of RAM unless you do some hardcore rendering, and even then you are still leaving yourself a large overhang. RE graphics cards: If you take the SLI option, then the two 560's would just fit in at max settings. You would get fairly frequent frame drops when playing though. If going SLI in general, doesnt matter what cards you use, I recommend the use of this tool. If the game you want to play doesnt have an official SLI profile (and in many cases already does) then the tool will give you noticeably better performance. EDIT: Just noticed you didnt have a PSU and CPU cooler. My recommendations are: PSU (Can go cheaper and lower output if desired, this allows for overhang) CPU Cooler (I dont recommend water cooling, fans are easier to setup and maintain) Thermal paste (100% recommend this paste. The one packaged paste I've tried that hasnt turned to concrete after getting hot)

The Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks is a good series you may be interested in.

Been becoming quite attached to Lights lately.

Latency, combined with the hitbox being client and not server-side. Basically, if you still look like you're standing up in clean sight on the shooter's end, youll still take damage if he shoots. Its why people with a higher ping tend to have a potential for BS kills.

A Lian Li case, anti static gloves, a can of doctor pepper, and a 32" screen. My plan of action: ration the doctor pepper while hiding out in the huge house of a case.

In my (limited) experience with overclocking a CPU back in the day, either it was the 775 processor or the P5kpl motherboard (tried with both the AM and the C/CM) but something was making it damn hard to get any overclock at all, let alone a stable one. The tiniest adjustments would bluescreen the whole system :\ That was on a Core2Quad Q6600. Glad im off 775 now. That socket will always remind me of the Celeron.

I never asked for this.

Cant say ive ever gone into that much detail with the rest of the staff. Most of my job is setting it up hardware side and ensuring that any hardware faults are dealt with. I can, however answer most of those questions. "Do you use 2x00K or 3xx0 K/X CPU when testing video cards?" i7 3930k. "...is hyper-threading turned off?" Yes. "Is this done with Asus ROG motherboards, which can deliver marginally better performance?" EVGA X79 Classified. "Do you use low ripple, stable voltage power supplies like high-end Seasonics for your overclocking tests?" The one in the test bench is actually a Seasonic x1050. "Is the specialist performing them experienced in overclocking ranging from hard voltmods to timings fine-tuning?" He says he is, take it with a grain of salt though, ive never really been fond of the guy. "Do you make sure to perform comparative testing on the same day with the same drivers and not recycle old results?" Of course. We scrub the results and start fresh if it takes too long. "Are your OS, games and benchmark applications installed on one Intel or Crucial drive in AHCI configuration?" Not as such. An OCZ RevoDrive X4 240gb in AHCI. "Do you actually connect 120 Hz displays for 1080p and below tests and 30" ones for 2560x1600 tests?" I believe that the one for 1080p tests is only a 75Hz :\ "Do you use wired PS/2 keyboards and simple USB optical mice with standard 125 Hz polling rate?" Couple of crappy beige ones, yeah. "Is your framerate monitoring software configured and verified not to cause any fps loss?" Not too sure on this one. IMPORTANT EDIT: Turns out one of the 580's used in the benchmark (2 SLI 580 vs 1 670) was dying. Put a little too much voltage through it and it didnt do too well. RMA sent, though none of us are really expecting a replacement, due to it being the "specialist's" cock up.

Oh, so its not on boot? Does it happen during any certain task, or at random? Also, please attach some more minidump files, this will help narrow the issue down.

We havent been able to get any of the Asus cards into the store unfortunately, so i cant comment on its performance. Also, as for online benchmarks, i tend to find that the ones we get done in store come up with radically different numbers. Some for the better, but a shockingly high amount for the worse. More common on the late AMD 6XXX cards, and for the lower end NVidia 5XX's.