Nysba

Lies. Won't perform bad or crash. It'll perform WORSE than what it would wit the updates, but not bad.

128GB is easily enough if you have a 1TB hard drive, as long as you don't put every single game that's 20GB in size on the SSD. I've never had less than 50GB free space on my 128GB, and I've had WoW and Skyrim and Oblivion on there from time to time.

Make sure NVSE and the game are in their latest versions.

Long phone-line cables between the wall and your router/modem/whatever can cause serious issues. Was having huge internets problems and the cable was like 10 meters long... switched to a waaaay shorter one, the problems went down by about 90%. And yes, that's an actual calculation (number of problems/day).

Yeah, don't use too much. Too little is better than too much (especially if the paste conducts electricity), as long as you apply it to the center of the chip, after all that's where the heat is coming from. You could even go without paste. Though stupid, there should be enough contact between the CPU and the heatsink to not break anything. And once you press/clip/screw down the heatsink, it'll spread on its own, no need to do it with credit cards or whatever.

When it comes to SSDs, the only thing the Z68 boards have over the P67 is that you can use a small SSD as a cache for your HDD, effectively making it a hybrid drive. And I'm pretty sure it's like 64GB that it "supports", it can go above that, but it won't be at its best performance. Definitely not the reason you'd go Z68 over the P67. And I have no idea of other differences between them, I think the Z68 has on-board graphics. And yes, the P67 definitely supports Ivy Bridge, just like the Z68, they're all the same socket type. LGA 1155

600W is easily enough for a 560Ti, maybe even for 2. Don't worry.

Yeah, I figured as much. I may go with a 500W for now. But if you're 100% sure you'll upgrade in March, I'd say go with the 750W. It'll be cheaper than buying a 500W now and then upgrading later if you find out that the 500W isn't enough.

Real overkill on that PSU. For that card + CPU. But I guess it's a good idea since you'll probably be upgrading the GPU and CPU. Same for the motherboard.

65 isn't even close to what you should be worried about, if it gets to 80, it starts getting high, but still shouldn't break anything. Don't worry about it.

Install GPU-Z and have it make a log of the sensors. Go play a game for a while and after that check the logs.

What case you get is pretty much personal preference, try googling for any reviews that might point out any flaws in it and decide whether or not they're enough to change to some other case. Same for monitors, I guess. There's probably no major flaws in Asus' motherboards, that one has 2 PCI-E slots if you want to crossfire later on, pci slots and so on. And like I said, it's Asus, they make good boards. That GPU is probably one of the best budget GPUs (budget GPU compared to the 570 and higher). I can't say you can go wrong with that card, especially if building under a budget. You could consider the gtx 560Ti, though since you're going with an AMD cpu, going with an AMD video card is a wise choice, from what I've read. Dunno if it's just rumors. Doubt I have to say anything about DVD drives, even if I could... That PSU is good quality and 600W is just fine, I'm quite sure you could crossfire 2 6870s with a 600W as well. You could probably run it with a 400W as well, though that might be pushing it a little. RAM, maybe try to find a 1333 or 1600MHz kit if you can and it fits your budget. That CPU is definitely not horrible, but obviously not the best of the best. And yeah, HDD is HDD... SSD, there are probably cheaper alternatives you could go with, OCZ or Crucial or Corsair, but Intel is good quality as well.

the GTX 580 is more powerful than the 6970. The 6970 pretty much the equal to the 570, if not just slightly worse, but usually does better in high resolutions (2560x1600). It's all personal preference, really. Some motherboards can have qualities and stuff that make them better than others. There's also some performance difference between some motherboards, but rarely enough to matter. Though that Maximus IV Extreme is one of the best LGA 1155 motherboards out atm. and is definitely not required to have a good computer. No it wont But if you're deciding whether you should get 1 powerful card or 2 not so powerful ones, it's probably better to go with the single powerful one, unless you already have a weaker one that you could use alongside another one.

As far as I know, the difference between the 2600k and 2700k is only 100MHz, or 0,1 GHz. Nothing else. Though I did read something about them being hand-picked 2600Ks that overclock well and stuff, but is it worth the extra 50€ (dunno about dollars and other countries)? About the graphics card, the 6950 is very adequate and if you don't want to spend that extra moneyz on the 6970, the 6950 just fine. It's all up to you, really. And there's also the unlocking that Paxan_1 mentioned

My link

K, so I have some big mods like Bananasplit Better Cities and Qarl's Texture Pack (well, that's uninstalled atm but that's not the point) and everything seems to be running just fine without any major lag, except when I'm around many NPCs. Pretty annoying. So I decided I'd see how much of an improvement I get from deleting the NPCs with the console. The difference was huge. I started looking for any mods that might lower the amount of NPCs or something, with no success. I stumbled across the good old Oblivion Tweak Guide on tweakguides.com and figured I might as well read through it to see if I find anything that could help me. I think it was the part about self shadowing that got me to try this... It said the self shadowing can be a very big performance hit. So I tried disabling it but it didn't do anything, really. Then I figured "Hey, maybe it's the NPCs' faces that's causing the lag. (I remember reading something about facegen being laggy on New Vegas and thought maybe it's the same in Oblivion) I started poking around Oblivion.ini because I had seen settings there like "bUseEyenvMapping", "bFixFaceNormals", "bUseFaceGenHeads","bFaceMipMaps" and so on. So I started going through those in order to see if they do anything. Once I got to "bUseFaceGenHeads=1" and changed it to 0, the NPCs' heads disappeared. But something else happened as well... bUseFaceGenHeads=1 (the default, obviously) bUseFaceGenHeads=0 Look at the FPS counter on the top left corner. So now I've been looking around trying to find out why this is happening and how I can have the same FPS as without heads without actually taking out the heads. Any ideas?

At least I have undead chicken

Honestly the Bulldozer doesn't really live up to all the hype it was getting, but 8 cores for this cheap is a big step forward. Can't imagine what we'll have in a couple of years. The above post is also true

Video sizes can differ even if they're the same resolution and lenght (and therefore the buffer time is obviously longer as well), so I'd go with what Illiad said and say it depends on the user who uploaded it. I could be way off course here though, I'm not an expert.

You definitely do not need a 850W power supply. I think a 550W might be enough, maybe 600 to have some headroom. Of course you can go with an 850W to have some upgradeability in the future though. And please, don't just buy the one that's cheapest, the power supply isn't something you want to skimp on.