Yes, I'm thinking about botching the liquid cooler, however if I desperately wanted/needed one, I found this, http://www.corsair.com/cpu-cooling-kits/hydro-series-water-cooling-cpu-cooler/hydro-series-h60-cpu-cooler.html. Much cheaper and not as powerful (obviously) I'm thinking about just using fans instead. Thanks again guys, without this thread I'd be totally hopeless

I'm in Canada and use NCIX.com. They have a US site to at NCIXUS.com.

I've found the customer service to be top notch at the Canadian variant. I believe you can now price match on the US site to. Which you could do at first like here in Canada. Though I'm not 100% sure on that. (Think I recall a service rep mentioning it on the forums.)

Kiralyn2000 does have a point. Though water cooling is not strictly for OCing. At least the closed loop systems. The $400+ custom loops definitely are.

As mentioned, for me, half the decision was I much preferred the open space in my case leaving room to work inside. A tower made it hard to access some ports/stuff.

NewEgg.com is a really good site. It's where I get virtually all of my parts. They have a great search form and a large amount of customer reviews. They also have occasional sales that will save you a ton. If you're looking for a place to build it for you, you could try iBuyPower.com. A friend of mine recently purchased a liquid-cooled gaming rig from there, and he was very pleased with the results. He did complain about the shipping time. I purchased all my parts from NewEgg two weeks after he ordered his from iBuyPower, and I had mine up and running Skyrim a good week before he got his.

Regarding video cards, don't buy the 1gb GTX 560 Ti. The 2gb card is just a tiny bit more and will offer a considerable performance boost. This is the card I have: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127608

Will the 580 offer better performance? Probably. Will it offer $200 worth of better performance? Absolutely not.

It's the same argument for the i5 2500k vs the i7 2600k. Value comparison is very useful when buying components: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-2500K+%40+3.30GHz

The American half doesn't have the custom PC building, if I were to build the PC (which is on the Canadian part of the site) could I still have it shipped to me? Just wondering. I'm starting to look on Newegg/Tigerdirect for some of the definite choice parts you guys recommended.

Oh wow man, at first I checked out iBuyPower and was kind of like "meh seems confusing" (on account of weird setup of the site) but actually it makes it pretty easy for a layman like me. Only thing though, do you know, or could you ask your friend if he paid attention to the meter on the side that tell how good a selected game will run? I just want to know the legitimacy on that.

I've no idea, but I know he had his rig built to play Star Wars: The Old Republic. I built an almost identical rig, minus the liquid-cooling, and included a better video card in order to run Skyrim. Either way, I'd suggest visiting the official forums for any game you want to play to find out which configurations work best. Some older games will not play as well as newer ones on today's top end rigs. There are a variety of reasons for this, not the least of which is the extensive use of hyperthreading. Oblivion, for instance, made no discernible use of multi-core processors, meaning my top of the line Pentium D purchased specifically to run Oblivion hurt me more than it helped. In the same way, the new quad-cores wouldn't offer any real performance boost either. Every game, indeed every application, is unique in how it is configured to utilize system resources. Consequently, some "upgrades" people make to improve the experience have no real impact. Another example, Skyrim doesn't really benefit from have 16gb of memory as it's not setup to make use of it. So, again, I suggest researching each game separately in order to see what system specs would best run it.

Probably not, and you wouldn't want to pay the highway robber....I mean rip off ta......no wait, brokerage fees, that's what they call it.

You are probably better off sticking to Newegg/TigerDirect or variant.

Don't cross the blue and red wires.

So, Kloaked Khajiit, what's the current status of your new PC?