It's been a long time.. My Alienware is of 2005 vintage and is due for an upgrade. This is what I came up with at cyberpower. Thoughts? (Rig will be used for FSX & BF3 mainly)Tower & Accessories:CoolerMaster 690 II Advanced Mid-Tower800 Watts - CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 80 Plus Power Supply (80+ Gold)Maximum Enermax 120MM Case Cooling Fans for selected case (Maximum Silent Operation) (500-1,200 RPM T.B. Silence Black Color with Blue LED Twister Bearing 8-14 dBA [+0])CyberPower Xtreme Hydro Liquid Cooling Kit 240MM w/ Dual Fan(CPU & GPU Liquid Cool Capable, Extreme Overclocking Performance + Extreme Slient at 18dBA)NZXT Sentry LX Aluminum High Performance Fan Control, Clock, & Temperature DisplayMB, Processor, RAM:Asus P8Z68 Deluxe Intel Z68 ATX Mainboardw/ BT GO! Lucid Virtu, IntelSRT & 7.1 HD Audio, Dual GbLAN, IEEE 1394a, USB3.0, SATA-III RAID, 3 Gen2 PCIe X16, 2 PCIe X1 & 2 PCIIntel® Core™ i7-2600K 3.40 GHz 8M Intel Smart Cache LGA11558GB (4GBx2) DDR3/1600MHz Dual Channel Memory Module (Corsair Vengeance)Drives:40 GB Intel 320 Series SATA-II 3.0Gb/s SSD - 200MB/s Read & 45MB/s Write2TB (2TBx1) SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 64MB Cache 7200RPM HDDSony 24X Double Layer Dual Format DVD+-R/+-RW + CD-R/RW DriveInternal 12in1 Flash Media Reader/WriterNetwork, Sound, Graphics:Killer™ 2100 - Gigabit Maximum Network Performance Online Gaming Network Interface CardCreative Labs SB X-FI Titanium PCI Express Sound CardNVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 2GB 16X PCIe Video Card (EVGA Powered by NVIDIA)I'm trying to configure something I can recieve before the holidays, and I get a military discount at CyberPower (As weel as Alienware, Ibuypower, and Microtel) I don't have the time to build myself really...Anyhow, thoughts?

Looks very nice and I am sure the cooling will do an good job if I have come across the right one on the net. I am just wondering about the 40GB Intel SSD, it isn't very quick compared to most SSD's and are usually more expensive. So maybe consider your options.

Yours will cost a bit more than mine.And It would be a better system compared to mine :)I can O.C. mine up to 4.6 GHz easy as pie.Just used a 46 multiplier to the 100Mhz clock for 4.6 GigHz

Well, change o' plans... I decided to go ahead and build it myself. It's been a few years since I built one, but it saves me a few hundred $. So here is what I ordered:Tower & Accessories:Corsair 600T Special Edition White (Spent a little more here, but really love the look and no other case I found matched the features internally.)Corsair Professional Series Gold AX850 (850W)NZXT Sentry LX Aluminum High Performance Fan Control, Clock, & Temperature DisplayCorsair H100 Liquid CPU coolerMB, Processor, RAM:Asus P8Z68 Deluxe Gen 3Intel i7-2600k (Spent the extra $100 on the 2600k essentially only cause Newegg was out of stock on the 2500k, and I didn't want to wait.. lol)Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3/1600Drives:Corsair Force Series 3 60GB Internal SSD (Use for Intel Smart Response Cache? Or as Boot drive? Undecided, more below...)Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB 7200rpm 6.0GB/sHP 24x DVD/RWInternal 12in1 Flash Media Reader/WriterNetwork, Sound, Graphics:Killer™ 2100 - Gigabit Maximum Network Performance Online Gaming Network Interface CardCreative Labs SB X-FI Titanium PCI Express Sound CardNVIDIA EVGA Superclocked GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GBIt looks like my setup will be very similar to yours Fielder.Thoughts overall? I also need to decide on the primary use for the SSD. The Z68 board has the Intel Smart Response Technology available. Essentially it uses an SSd to cache commonly accessed files to speed up the system as a whole, they advertise up to 4x faster than a standard HDD based system. However, I've read mixed reviews about it online... If not used for that I will likely put the operating system and such on it, and use it as the boot drive with the HDD as the data drive. Thoughts? Looking forward to the build! I think this will be a huge improvment over my aging Q9450 based system. :)

Awesome rig. You'll love it!

Looks perfect! Good choice on the Gen 3 board.

Darn near perfect!

I would have gone just a little larger on the SSD. 60GB can cut it, but you will probably end up using 90%+ of its capacity. I think a 90GB SSD is perfect for a boot/program files drive. Then again, with the prices of some of the SATA II drives right now, it would be very tempting to go with a 256GB simply so I don't have to run 3+ hard drives in my computer.I think smart cache is limited to 40GB. But you don't want to mess with that anyway as it's between the performance of a regular mechanical drive and an SSD. If you're going to do an SSD, do it all the way!

Thanks for the comments! I'm leaning towards using the SSD as the boot/windows drive. The smart cache just doesnt seem worth it, though thats why i bought the smaller SSD. In hindsight, I should have gotten the 120gb since I now want to use it as the boot drive. Anyone with more experience have any thoughts on those two options? I'll need to decide before I build...Anything special with setting these SSDs up? Not familiar with them at all. Any issues with installing windows to them, I thought constant read/write was a problem?Can't wait to get it built up. Not looking forward to all the re-installs, but it'll be worth it in the end.