Profile of Swift

Well, I guess you're right about that! Although the high speed is not as useful when you're just opening video/audio/image files. Having everything on an SSD would be nice, but I have too much data (and not enough money) for that

Yeah, and I decided to not go with the SSD option because well... it was £70 more than the 1tb hard drive. I'll probably egt one at some point in the future and install my favourite games to it.

And yes, pictures coming next week!

Most mainstream HDDs come with two years of warranty and can easily last for five years of longer, if your PC is properly cooled.

For SSDs, the lifespan mostly depends on the amount of data that is written: The 275GB and 525GB MX300 models I suggested are rated for 80TB and 160TB, respectively. They come with three years of warranty, but as with all SSDs, that is only valid until those values are reached, a far as I know. So you should definitely take into account how much data you want to store and how often you want to move it.

Edit: I'm mostly talking about warranty here, but warranty obviously doesn't help much if your drive fails and your data is gone. Making regular backups is always advisable! But the general rule is that most of the time, HDDs do last quite a bit longer than SSDs.

Alright thanks. Major storage atm will be done on my laptop as a stopgap, I may end up getting a hard drive for the desktop itself some time in the future when this becomes too unwieldy.

Time to decide and order the parts

Changed the title. If you don't have notes or sources, please don't give it an official title.

Looks as if most of it's sorted then, I'm factoring in the more expensive items on the list and leaving out the hard drive. Not ideal, but Iw ant to cut cost wherever possible and so will use my laptop for general storage if needs be.

I have a very simple little mouse that I'll use for now until I decide it's really not nice, and I do have a Microsoft keyboard, though the b key goes funny quite a lot and sometimes other keys go out too, so if I can fix it, I'll keep it.

As for monitors, nothing fancy, 1080p and with decent contrast will do. Anyone know any cheap and decent ones to go with in particular, or does it not matter? And I don't need anything above 60Hz.

I'm excited

Can't see any CPU cooler here - you will probably need one.

As for the rest it looks quite ok, just going HDD only seems really questionable. You may not feel getting faster or slower cpu when using your pc, but you will most definitely feel the difference between having your operating system (and coh2) installed on HDD and SSD.

Btw, spending too much on motherboard usually ends up buying features that you will never use in the future.

Ok, thanks for the input. The CPU cooler wasn't in there to start with as the CPU comes with an inbuilt one, and I was't sure if it needed a second one and sicne I didn't make the build, I didn't want to change it.

Are SSDs really that necessary? I like a lot of storage, perhaps I don't need it, but I like to know I have plenty of room. Getting an SSD over a 1 or 2 TB hard drive gives me faster, yet smaller and more expensive storage. I know it impacts loading times a lot but I'm still undecided on the benefits of the SSD.

First list: Getting an i5-6600K is really only a good idea if you want to overclock, which I wouldn't recommend with a new PC, much less if you're a beginner, so you could save money by getting an i5-6600 or 6500 instead. In that case, you also wouldn't need the expensive Z170 board and could buy a B150 or H170 board for half the money. I'd say the PSU is a bit oversized as well. And finally, unless you want to install a huge cooler, two GPUs or several hard drives, a large ATX case also isn't necessary. If you want your machine to be silent, Nanoxia cases are a good choice and very affordable.
I'm not saying this is a bad build, but it seems completely oversized to me. You could probably save about $200 here while barely losing any performance. It also lacks a CPU cooler, which is absolutely essential, as boxed coolers suck.

The second one looks a lot more sane to me. Getting an i7 for gaming is not necessary, though. The advantage over the i5 series is Hyperthreading (one core can do two things, basically), but most games don't support that. Besides, your GPU will be the bottleneck anyway! If you ask me, you should go for an i5 instead and spend the $100 you save on a CPU cooler and an SSD.

I don't know much about the difference, so the GHz clock and the numbers are all I can really distinguish personally, so I didn't question the 6600k much, but you're right in that I don't want to overclock, too afraid I'll break it when building it, don't need it breaking when it's done :] Of course overstating at this point, but I'm no tech guru, so I'll keep things as they are.

Know absolutely nothing about motherboards, so umm... saving money is good?

Again, power supplies, all I can tell is wattage wise and I don't know what a safe ratio is, aka, how much higher the wattage should be in relation to the estimate, as the second build shows the estimate around 280w but the unit there delivers 450w. Problem? No problem?

Cases, fairly content with any old case so long as it has 3/4+ USB ports somewhere on it. I don't know what the brands and builds are like at all.

As for the second build, perhaps an advantage of the i7 is as previously stated: more shelf life? If there is a similar i5 alternative that's decently cheaper (£50-£80 cheaper) then I would definitely drop it, however, I don't want to replace it in a hurry and pennies spent today may save pennies down the line.

Back to SSDs, are they the real deal now?

Anyway, thanks for the guidance. In the end I just feel like this guy: