Well like the majority of builds in the past few weeks this is a first build. I started researching all of the things necessary to make this build happen around August of this year, when I decided to fully swap to PC gaming. I know I said PC gaming, yet there's no GPU.....well that's because I'm most likely getting a 290/290x non reference when they come out. For now the integrated is doing fine (187 FPS in League of Legends with settings maxed out). Over all the whole build took me about an hour to complete, I bought every part on Small Business Saturday excluding the case (ordered it off Newegg because my local Micro Center said they were out of stock online and couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone....Oh well). I put this together Tuesday night at 11pm when UPS finally got my case to me, it shipped out for delivery at 6:23am from my local store which is 10 minutes away....by 3pm I was starting to think they'd gotten my hopes up for nothing ^{_^.} I know my cable management is pretty crappy compared to most of the build on here, I'm sorry I was eager to get it running. My laptop (sole computer) crapped out on me last Sunday after 6 years, it was a Sony Vaio F series collectors addition that I picked up for $700 instead of the $2300 price tag. I know laptops aren't anything close to desktops but I was 13 at the time....when you're 13 and paying for it yourself you don't just pass up a deal like that.

Part Breakdown:

CPU: i7 4770k~ I do video rendering/editing/programming/multitasking/gaming/music creation/multi OS booting.....and there's probably more but the point is the hyper threading helps out a lot and I wanted Intel over AMD (sheer personal preference). I haven't messed with overclocking much but I got it to load and stabilize at 4.7ghz at 1.20V, I guess I hit the silicon lottery jackpot? I put it back to stock for now because I don't really need it overclocked at the moment. I'll tinker with it in a few weeks when I get some free time and post temps from Prime95, I think it was hitting like 60 degrees C, it's like 10 degrees Fahrenheit where I live so that's probably helping out (actually we just got our first snow of the year today).

CPU cooler: well it's the standard 212 EVO...it does the job

Thermal Compound: I didn't want to use the crappy kind that came with the 212 EVO so I picked this up at Best Buy as an after thought.

MOBO: I'm a bit of an audiophile and I wanted a mobo that'd last me 4-6 years hopefully, the Hero fit my needs quite well (originally I wanted the Formula but I couldn't see paying the extra cost for it).

RAM: well I was going to get a DDR3 2400 16gb (2x8gb) Gskill set but I needed to get my machine up and running asap and Newegg (cheapest place to get it at the time) told me it would be 3-5 weeks before it'd be at my house when I called them to check. It was just too long of a wait for me so I went with low profile Vengeance instead, it was on a good sale so I couldn't resist. By the way they're actually black in color, I couldn't find the black listed on partpicker but they're the same as the ones listed just a different color.

Storage: I'm going to get the drive in a week or two, I have something like 15tb's in external's I'm using right now for media storage and a 256 gb SSD from my laptop. I actually didn't know it was an SSD until I pulled it out to throw it in this rig (boot time is 6-8 seconds from being off).

Case: Fractal Define R4~ What to say...It's simplistically elegant and sexy looking, has a decent amount of space without being so massive that it becomes an eye sore, oh and it's super quite (huge plus for me). Plus it was something like half off with free shipping...made it and easy choice over the Phantom 410.

PSU: I went with one of the good brands (no Raidmax for me, I like my house whole and not burnt down) Corsair. It's a 750w gold rated because I'm getting a 290/290x maybe two down the line (if I crossfire I'll upgrade to a higherwattage) and I wanted a PSU that could handle them. It's quiet, nice looking, does the job well, plus it was on a great sale.

Optical Drive: Well it reads/writes Blueray, DVD, CD, the works. I back up all of my movies and T.V series to hard drives, makes it easy to put them on my iphone 5 to watch on the go when you have a digital copy also :D. It was a good deal, not necessary for most people but I'll get good use out of it.

OS: Yes it cost me nothing. No I did not obtain it illegally, it's an actual Microsoft copy of Windows 8 (upgraded to 8.1 for free because why not) that was around my house so I laid claim to it.

Well thank you for looking, it was a fun experience and I'm not going back to prebuilt systems anytime soon. For being 19 and purchasing it all without any financial assistance I'm quite happy with the deals I got. Here's to hoping I can get something similar on my GPU. Oh sorry for the crappy quality photo's, they're just high resolution ones taken with my iphone 5.

Feedback is appreciated, especially regarding how to fix my cable management.