DelusionalSyko

I like your spunk. I'd also recommend the Hyper 212 Evo. I run it on my i7-4790k with the fan it came with, and another noctua fan. Temps never go above 58C when gaming and about 62 - 63 on load.

I'm not sure if anyone here has had past experience with PfSense Firewall installations, but I usually roll these out with customers who require a cheap reliable firewall setup, but I always use end up using an HDD from a donor PC that they have. I've done a little research on the benefits of using an SSD for Pfsense, but this article came up against it: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=34381.0 But that was dated back to 2011, we have much better and much more reliable SSD's on the market now than we did in 2011. And they're experience with dead SSD's were with 8GB - 16GB capacity drives. My idea was to use something like a Samsung 850 Pro 120GB for the drive, but I'm not sure if the risk of killing the SSD is worth the performance gain (Not even sure if there IS a significant performance gain with an SSD) that Samsung has a 5 year warranty, but I don't want the drive to die and have their firewall be dead until I get a replacement. Reliability is top priority for the drive. So, does anyone HAVE experience with PfSense? If so, do you use a regular HDD, or an SSD in your build? I'm curious to see if it's worth it to start rolling these things out with SSD's for faster boot times.

That's because when you DO finally figure it out, they wipe your memory.

Go into the BIOS and select the proper boot device. Sounds like your system is trying to boot from the other hard drive.

Unplug everything external from the PC except the monitor and see if it gets past the POST splash page.

Are you saying that if you let the PC boot normally, it will blue screen, but if you hit F11 and select the proper boot device, it's fine every time?

Specs for that wifi card: Speed: 802.11 b/g/n : downlink up to 300Mbps, uplink up to 300Mbps(20/40MHz) So no...it wont connect to a 5Ghz connection. Edit: it also says it runs on the 2.4Ghz frequency, didn't see that on the spec list first time through.

Different channels come into play if you are in an area with other radio's broadcasting near your router. You don't want to be on the same broadcast channel as another access point, so if you're in something like an apartment building or in an area that's close to other people with routers, changing the channel will help with latency and dropping signal issues. I would honestly recommend picking a channel that isn't any where near the channel of other routers in the area (Wifi analyzer comes in handy for determining the channel of other broadcasts) In my experience, picking a higher number has usually benefited me, but most routers are on "auto" which will pick a random channel. Play with the channel settings and see if it solves your issues.

If you're on a windows OS, hold the windows key on your keyboard and hit R. This will bring up the "Run" program. In the text field type "CMD" and hit enter, this will bring up command prompt. In command prompt type: ipconfig This will display your current IP configuration. Scroll down until you find "Default gateway", (Should be something like 192.168.1.1, or 10.0.0.1) that will be the IP address you enter into the address bar of a browser. the username and password is usually admin/admin or admin/password for most routers.

^ This is a good question, If you have your system overclocked at all, issues like this can happen very frequently. If you DO have it overclocked, I'd recommend setting everything back to stock and see if that fixes the issue.

See if there's an updated firmware available for that board. Here's the download page: http://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/X99DELUXE/HelpDesk_Download/ What I usually do is compare their version with the version that's already installed on your system. To check to see what version you have installed, boot into windows and open the run command tool (Windows key + R) and type in "dxdiag.exe" and when it asks about digitally unassigned drivers say yes. On the first tab it will show you your current motherboard firmware version.

You don't need a dedicated graphics card to run games like Civ 5 and LoL, the XPS 13 is a good laptop and should fit your requirements perfectly. Just remember, if you need a copy of Office, laptops don't come with it (Most times it's preloaded, but you'll have to spend the extra $180+ to get a license key) I'd also suggest taking a look at the Lenovo Y40, I keep seeing good deals on them and they seem pretty decent (Even though I'm not a huge lenovo fan, but every company has good products as well as bad)

I personally have this http://us.msi.com/product/mb/Z97M-GAMING.html#hero-overviewand I really like it. Or, watch this

There's no such thing as future proofing. If you want to spend the money on an insane 6 to 8 core intel processor, no ones stopping you. But gaming and most applications utilize fewer, faster cores. The i7 4790k @ 4.0Ghz stock is an insane processor (I have it personally) and it doesn't cost a ridiculous amount. You can even get an i5 and overclock the shit out of it, saving even more money and not losing very much. I'd say go for the 4790k and use the rest of the money on a GPU, since more expensive GPU's make more of a difference than more cores on a processor.