$1,500 gaming rig suggestions

The built in fan controller is crap, it only lets you adjust the fans from about 75% to 100% so you'd have to get a dedicated fan controller if you want a quiet system (or depending on your tolerances it might be ok, I like my systems silent when not gaming).

Airflow is ok but not on the level of the HAF cases, you can change the plastic window to a mesh one (it comes with both) and mount a few fans on there. If you're going for watercooling the top bit seems like a great place to put a radiator. Also the HD cages are removeable and you can move them around.

Depends on what kind of watercooling you're looking at.
CPU sealed loop (Corsair/Antec/Asetek units) - any chassis that will fit a 1 or 2 x 120/140mm fan placement will do
CPU only loop - Again, any mid tower will do if you're looking at a 5.25" bay reservoir. A large mid tower or full tower if you're looking at a multioption reservoir + integral or seperate pump. A 240 or 280 rad is fine for Sandy/Ivy Bridge.
CPU+ GPU usually means two radiators- so a large mid tower with roof + floor or rear mounting.
I listed a few of the more popular chassis in a watercooling guide that I wrote while you were away- it also includes a guide to work out how much cooling you would need for a given power usage/heat output. It might come in handy, and I'd definitely recommend working out your cooling requirements and component placement then finding a chassis that fits the bill.

Thanks Rage and slh28.

I will look into the 600T further and determine whether this mid-tower can house a watercooling system without hassles / mods. Else might move towards full towers. My only concern with a full sized chassis is that there is a shelf above my case at a height of 22-23 inches from the ground. For a full tower I'd have to find a slightly different location.

@DBZ - Will definitely go through that guide once I get home. Thanks a ton for all your inputs.

Here's my current rig that I will be purchasing next month:

Ivy Bridge i7 3770k (Unlocked)
Asus Maximus V Formula
Asus GTX 670 Direct CUII TOP
Asus 24x DVD-RW SATA
G.skill RipjawsX 8gb 1600 CL9
1TB Western Digital Caviar Black
128gb OCZ Vertex 4
Cooler Master HAF X
Cooler Master TPC 812
Cooler Master SilentProHybrid 1300w

that would be around $1500-1600

you can change i7 to i5 3570k if you want.

A little bit of help regarding SSDs. Only the OS being on the SSD leads to a difference in performance from what I gather. So do I need an SSD greater than 60GB?

Yeah, because 128/120GB drives are generally quite a bit quicker than 64/60GB ones. Also you'll find a 64GB one fills up very quickly after installing the OS, your programs, a couple of games and also bear in mind SSDs work best with 10-15% space free.

Since 128GB drives are quite a bit less than twice the price of 64GB ones I suggest get a 128GB one at least.

Ok. So I did some further reading up on SSDs and have come across terms such as synchronous and asynchronous NAND. I would like to know whether the difference in price is justified. Also, a few more recommendations on good 120GB+ SSDs would greatly help.

Full Tower #FTW and enables alot better air flow. I have the cooler master HAF 932 and it's stock fans are a beast!

Synchronous-flash SSDs are the best buy, especially if paired with a good SandForce controller.

The Corsair Force GT series would be my recommendation, along with the OCZ Vertex series.

A list of the all the brand-name to SSD-type mappings and reviews can be found here.

Ok. So here goes:

CPU - Intel i5 3570K
Mobo - ASRock Z77 Extreme 4
PSU - Corsair TX 750
RAM - G-Skill 2x 4GB (Ripjaws or any other series that is available)
Cooler - Corsair H100
Case - Corsair Graphite 600T (White)
SSD - Corsair Force Series GT (120GB)

How do the above components look?

And now for the dilemma. I might have a little bit extra to play with. Which GPU would be a better choice among the GTX 660 Ti, GTX 670 and the Radeon HD 7950? I would like to go for a multi(2) GPU setup in the near future.

The GTX 670 would the best choice, IMHO.

Thumbs up from my perspective.

Wish I could help you on that one. The only thing I can do is look at benching results and quote which one looks better. I think all three are great choices to consider.

Toggle NAND > Synchronous NAND > Asynchonous NAND.
Larger capacity usually translates to faster read/write speeds ( levelling off usually at the 240-256GB capacity)
Smaller process nodes used now (<25nm) generally give a lower total Read/write lifetime - though using a drive primarily for OS duties should keep the amount of data written/erased fairly low.
I'm using a Kingston HyperX (Synchronous SandForce controller) with zero problems w/ Win7 and 8, although firmware updates to other SandForce drives make them an equally strong choice. Tom's Hardware have a quarterly(?) SSD buyers guide/roundup- might be worth checking out.
I'd second Rage's GTX 670 advice. Strong card with very good gaming qualities. I wouldn't underestimate the adaptive v-sync feature (eliminates screen tearing on graphically unchallenging games), and doubling up to SLI in future will give very good scaling and a fairly low incidence of microstutter.

Thanks DBZ.

However, I still am having a few doubts with the GTX 670 Vs HD 7950, especially with the upcoming price-cuts. There are a lot of people on the web who, I see, have mentioned that it is a very overclock friendly card achieving speeds upto 1200MHz. At these speeds it does perform better than a 670. I wonder how an OC's 670 does in comparison to an OC'd 7950. Also, people talk of the GTX 670 being bandwidth constrained in games such as Crysis, Metro 2033. Why?

If you're getting a GTX 670 get one with an aftermarket cooler or the EVGA FTW one with the 680 PCB, the stock ones aren't very good.

After seeing the recent price cuts I'd actually recommend the 7950 over the 670. Dunno about your country but in the UK the 7950 has dropped to £225 (£240 for a MSI TF3 which are very OC friendly) compared to £299 for the 670. That's a very significant price difference especially if you're considering getting 2 cards. But then there are people who claim that SLI experiences less microstutter than CF so you might want to read up on that as well.

If the card will do 1200M then you're good to go - I don't think anything is guaranteed when it comes to overclocking. For a heavy OC you're definitely going to need to look at vendor designs rather than reference - good cooling plus beefy VRM (Some of the newer cards skimp on components - the Sapphire Flex range comes to mind). If you're buying with OC in mind, skip the wannabe's on mainstream sites - hit the reviews and the enthusiast forums - you'll want to see validation with the card stressed. Anyone can clock a card through the roof and get GPU-Z validation in a 2D desktop enviroment (which is why it means nothing), and Anyone+their dog can say their card can do XXXXMHz

Simple. Check around for OC vs OC ( 670 vs 7950) or 670 vs 7970 ( which should equate roughly with an OC'ed 7950)

The exception rather than the rule. Some games will happily fill the 2GB frame buffer and saturate the memory bus, but generally this happens at high res (5760x1080 for example) and/or a heavy use of full screen AA. You whack the I.q. to max on Metro 2033 ( by that I mean tessellation, depth of field and 4 x MSAA) and any card will suffer...unless you know anyone who enjoys playing a twitch shooter at 20 frames per second You'll notice that the OC'ed 7950 beats the OC'ed 670 by a massive 15.4% - tres impressive!!...until you notice that it's 19.65 fps and 17.03 fps.
At 1920x1080 you won't have any problem with the frame buffer or memory bus width that doesn't also affect any other single GPU card.

As an owner of HD 5850 CFX and GTX 580 SLI I'd be one of those people. I'd characterize microstutter on Nvidia cards to run from zero to annoying, and AMD from zero to infuriating. Plenty of info on the web. ComputerBase do comparisons on occasion and Tech Report have some very good articles -and most importantly, reproduceable results.

Personally I'd worry about getting the single card first. Not everyone is affected by microstuttering to the same extent, and not all games are bad - it's just unfortunate that a lot of shooter games are affected

A good compromise would be to purchase an aftermarket-cooled 670 design, rather than a reference one, as slh28 recommended.

It would give you potential performance that would be between that of a 670 and a 680; you'd need to have a really well-binned 7950 that you can OC to match this kind of performance, IMHO.

I have shortlisted 2 cards:

1. EVGA GTX 670 FTW or
2. ASUS GTX 670 TOP Edition

However, in case these are not available in my region what are some other good ones that I could opt for? I have looked at the Zotac GTX 670 Amp edition but the three slot design makes me a little skeptical about managing an SLI in the near future.

EDIT: Just got off the phone with the sole EVGA distributor here. The 670 arrives next week. But not the FTW edition.

If you're still looking for a good non-reference 670- other than the DCIIT, there are some good 2-2.5 -slot cards to be had:
Palit Jetstream ( reviews here...and here...and here )
MSI Power Edition (reviews here...and here..and here)
Gigabyte Windforce (reviews here...and here...and here - which includes a comparison with the Zotac AMP! and Palit Jetstream)

DBZ, do you recommend any particular one from the above cards? I'm not getting the "Top" edition either.

For the case, I'm going with the Corsair Obsidian 650D. Any thoughts? The 650D is surprisingly cheaper than the 600T here!

EDIT: The decision keeps getting tougher. Seems I can pick up a HD7970 at the price of the GTX 670 here. What should I do? The 7970 is the OC Edition by Sapphire.