Vis Maior

Thoughts, critiques, and recommendations please:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/FRbszy

I'll take a look at some comps when I get home. Are you wanting to keep 1.2Kish or do you have some room?

I've got a bit of wiggle room.

Looks pretty good overall.

Couple thoughts:
1) I have had better luck with EVGA cards but YMMV
2) Once Pascal comes out 970 will probably drop in price like a rock, maybe wait on the card if able?
3) I've had really good luck with the Corsair water cooling for my cpu it's been super stable through 120 degree summers.
4) Maybe not necessary for you but I run 3x Samsung EVO SSDs - 1 as a boot drive and 2 in RAID 0 that I just install games on, if it dies who cares. It does over 1GB/s read/write so it crushes load times. Probably the single largest performance boost you can get is overcoming storage.

Looks good George.

I'd pick up a few case fans for your tower to make sure cool air flows over the videocard and the hot air is adequately removed. Stock fans general blow(not enough!)

If you have the spare change I'd pick up a second SSD or get a larger one.

I'd also consider trying to wait until the next generation of nvidia cards comes out and either get the x70 version of that or pick up a 980 after the price drops.

On a personal note I'd rather get the current flagship video card wise as they have higher resale values before new cards launch or in general. Planning to get a budget card and sli-ing/xfiring down the line isn't a good choice. Support for multiple cards just generally sucks and you can deal with other bullshit such as frame tearing. This is of course anecdotal for me, but plenty of others also come to this conclusion. Some swear that budget sli is the way to go though.. I once did but not any more fuck that. Flagship, sell, pay the difference for the new flagship. The last time I worked out the numbers this generally is the most economical way to keep up rather than skipping a few generations and paying full price.

If you don't care to much down the road a x80Ti is still going to last you longer than a x70 series, unless they start coming up with crazy leaps of performance in between gens.