While I agree with on the "One Peterbilt vs. Two Pickups" view in regards to GPUs, SSDs only have the advantage of "No Moving Parts". Western Digital's Velociraptor line of 10,000 RPM HDDs work just as well, and are relatively less expensive. If your tower has nothing but a singular optical drive taking up one of it's seven 5.25" bays, consider getting an Optical Drive Mount-to-3.5" HDD Mount Cage. Get a good one, with a "universal" build (brands like Thermaltake and Cooler Master make these cages, but they really only work well with "like brand" cases), noise and vibe dampeners, and a dust filter for an integrated fan. It goes without saying that you'll need to keep your front panel "door" open (if your case has one) for the fan to do any good.

If you're brand-spanking new at liquid cooling, and your hardware needs immediately dictate something more powerful than a self-contained LC unit, then you might want to start off with something like a Pump/Radiator/Reservoir hookup.

your talking over $100 there (lol #3 as to why I haven't tried out liquid cooling) and on top of which still involve noisy case fans on the radiator.

To be honest, I won't be doing it again. It was more out of curiosity than anything else. It's kind of nice, but apart from the geekiness of having a liquid cooled system, it's not really worth it for most folks.

Most likely, I'll be sticking to air cooled and then only having them on when I'm wanting to game. It's amazing how much power laptops these days have.

I can say personally that one NVIDIA GTX 580 (I got the SuperClocked EVGA one, so I might have a bit of a heads up on other people with 580s) is good enough for every single game on the market at 1920x1080 with all settings maxed, including AA and such. I have Metro 2033 with every setting maxed and get 70 fps at all times.

As for water cooling, I find it wasteful. I have a Raven 3 case from Silverstone, which uses a ridiculously useful and efficient method: it turns the motherboard so the back panel is facing up. Airflow is bottom to top, exactly the most efficient way to lose heat. My i7 2600k is running 4 GHz on air cooling and barely scrapes 70C at load, with a REALLY cheap heatsink and only one CPU fan, both from Cooler Master. I didn't even apply the thermal paste according to directions. Now put a Zalman cooler (or at least a decent push-pull fan setup) in that thing with proper application of decent thermal paste and you can probably go to ridiculous heights.

I can only recommend that if you want to save money but still have a beast of a machine with ridiculous cooling, you turn your head towards the Raven and Fortress series of cases by Silverstone. They are positively unparalleled for their ability to stay cool and stay quiet. I can personally recommend the Raven 3, it was the case for this, the first PC I ever built -- and my long term builder friends are envious.

Thanks for the advice guys. In the benchmarking I have seen the nVidia cards seem to scale really well. For a cost to power ratio two way SLI seems really sensible. I'm only going 3-way because this is the last upgrade I'm going to be doing for quite a while so may as well go the whole hog.

On the SSD front I have got one that I am running my OS and some apps from. Not going to get one for my games drive, they are just too small and I like to have all my games installed on the one HDD. It's a bit OCD but thats how I like it.

I've already ordered my new case. I went with the Corsair Obsidian 800D. Ordered my new Motherboard (Asus Rampage III Formula), CPU (i7 960) and RAM as well.

Still deciding on video cards but I'm looking at 3 GTX570's. The main reason I am looking at water is I'm afraid of cooking my centre video card.

I've ordered an additional 4 120mm fans to fit in the case as well. I'm just not confident that this will run cool enough.

You'd be amazed at their soporific qualities.

Those do seem to be pretty good. Benchmarking suggests that it depends on your intended usage as to which is more applicable as they're actually faster than SSDs in some tests (not a lot cheaper this side of the pond though).

I use the Velociraptor as my Boot Drive (C:\; Windows, etc), and for system programs and utilities. Games are installed on Drive D:\ (WD Caviar Black; SATA 6GB/s), and all "loose" media are stored on an external USB 2.5" form-factor drive (WD Elements). The Velociraptor drives themselves are 2.5" form-factor drives, but they're set in these fairly large heatsinks that bring them up to the standard 3.5" size. It's like a guy with a high top fade, and includes that extra height when someone asks "how tall are you?". Anyway, the WEI rates my HDD performance at 5.9, while everything else gets an average of 7.7 (Graphics are 7.9, CPU is 7.4, RAM is 7.5). I'm a moderately patient man who's been at this since before forty-five seconds was the average load time for a ~840k floppy, so my definition of "long load time" may vary greatly from the next man, especially if the next man is a five year old, but I think I can safely say that the speed of my home-built won't cause a person of voting age to complain.

We got our tax estimate today and it was a lot better than we thought. The better half has given me the OK for 3K for upgrade to my PC.

I thought I would post thecomponents I am looking to grab and get some opinions. Some of it may seem a bit pedantic but it's gotta come outta the 3k so I've included all the little bits and pieces as well. There are some components I am not replacing ie. monitor and keyboard etc... so expect to see some omisions.

Case - Corsair Obsisian 800D - $380
Case Fans - Enermax Twister Bearing Silence VR 120mm x4 - $88
Cable Managment - Nexus Velcro Cable Ties x4 - $14
CPU - Intel Core i7 960 - $295
CPU Fan - Thermaltake Frio OCK - $90
Motherboard - Asus Rampage III Formula - $339
Memory - Corsair 12GB 2000 Dominator GT - $325
Power Supply - Corsair AX1200 Gold - $365
Video Card - Asus GeForce GTX 570 DirectCU II 1280MB - $380
Hard Disk - OCZ Agility 3 120GB SSD - $239
Hard Disk 2 - WD Green 2TB 7200RPM - $89
Mouse - Logitech G700 - $100
Mouse Pad - Steel Series 9HD Pro - $50 (I have a new desk and want to avoid scratches)
Headset - Logitech G930 - $185
Postage - $50

Total - $2989 ( Leaves me $10 to buy something on GoG ;) )

Thanks guys.

I am, Just make you get a seal contained cooler. I've only Over-clocked my processer from 2.66 ghz to 3.25ghz. They're great, but if you work on your machine (upgrade) make sure to slightly rock it back and forth a little, sometimes an air bubble can form... = dead proc.
Very nice rig, Just one question why such a huge power supply?

Mainly for future proofing. I intend to go to 3-way SLI in the future (I was going to do it this time but elected to upgrade my mobo, cpu and ram instead). Also I like the idea of having redundant power. You never know what sort of power guzzling components will come along in the next few years.

like everyone else said that three way is just not a valid option. it won't future proofed anything.
if you want to future proof then put that money into savings account at min. 5% compound interest and then buy AMD 7950 or Geforce 680 whenever they are released. wasting money on third card is pointless.

My future proofing reference was in regards to the power supply question. In regards to 3-way SLI I have found that scaling differs greatly from chipset to chipset. GTX590 scales very well in the benchmarks I have seen.

As SLI tech improves the benefits of multi-card over 2 will become more and more viable. When I am ready to go 3 way in a few years time I'll have enough redundant power to cover it.

Wait. You can get 5% compound interest? Around here we're lucky if we can get 1%, in my lifetime I've never seen an interest rate that was at all competitive with inflation.

And folks in other countries wonder why we don't save our money very well. It's all those .7% compound interest accounts that tend to do that to a country. And some of them aren't too ashamed to charge .1%