Would be nice to hear from you guys on CPU coolers.
In my opinion, stock cooling is sufficient these days unless you're doing heavy overclocking or have other needs (passive cooling for noise reduction, for instance) but those subjects are beyond the scope of this guide.
Not when that was written. Go read launch reviews. I'll change the text to reflect the current state of things, thanks.The GTX 680 is $50 more expensive than the HD 7970, not the other way around , and the performance is almost the same without overclocking since the latest driver update.
SSD+HDD in one system means SSD is for OS, apps, games, exe files etc., and the HDD is for storage. and that renders the speed of the HDD as irrelevant (minus file transfers which don't happen often), so why recommend a power hungry, loud and performance oriented HDD when the focus should be the opposite?
Because even with a 256GB SSD, many people would still be forced to have things like games on a secondary drive. I don't even have half of my games installed and they occupy about 500GB. The power and noise differences between WD Green and Black drives are beyond negligible in this type of system.
I barely use my disc drive (once or twice last year) and you install two?
Yep, for $17 it seems worthwhile to list a secondary optical drive for the slight bit of added functionality. The whole point of our guide is to offer a complete blueprint for each budget that works fine as is, but can be easily tweaked to your needs. If you barely use optical drives, obviously you'd leave one or both of them out and that's totally fine.
Finally, just imo, Gigabyte motherboards for their futures and Silverstone USB3.0 cases such as FT03 and RV02E for their superior air-cooling deserve a nod.
Thanks for the recommendations.