r3xx3r

If you have the kind of money to get the 1080 strix as you want, then absolutely get it. There is no question that it will be pretty much***** the best card on the market when it launches (*****within a few percent up or down of the other aftermarket 1080's out there. Silicon lottery will impact you more than specific brands*****). And if you want to go as far as watercooling it and overclocking it to the limit, I entirely support that choice if you can afford it. I've not really looked at any 1080p benchmarks for the 1080, but its entirely probable that you will be playing your games at max settings well over 100 FPS (and i mean MAX settings, even the ones that don't make any sense to use lol). In a lot of games you would be pinned to 144 most of the time (although your mileage may vary)
 
Don't bother with 970 SLI. that wouldn't touch the performance of a single 1080, even IF everything ran 100% smoothly in SLI (which it almost never does)


If you don't want to go for the price of the 1080, the 1070 is also a very viable (and still very overkill) option for 1080p. Then there are the curent polaris cards under that if you want to go really budget, but I don't know that they would keep 100% of all games ALWAYS above 60 fps at max graphics. Still an amazing card, especially considering the price, but if you want that fps, you gotta invest the cash!

I appreciate the in-depth reply. I will recommend recommend him the i3. I am looking through the wikipedia article now. your response is very enlightening. Thank you.

Hey r3xx3r,   What are the drives that you have? As the guys said, you can either go for RAID0 or do a simple JBOD SPAN. You can actually go for any type of RAID that your motherboard supports (even RAID5). The problem would be that the two 1TB drives will each be limited to 500GB because of the third drive and work with the speed of the 500GB drive. That would give you 1.5TB usable space at most. My suggestion is to go for JBOD SPAN and simply use fully all three drives. Although there is not speed boost or redundancy with JBOD SPAN, your computer will see the drives as one big volume and, in case any of them fails, you can still read the data off the other two (as long as it is not written across two drives).   Hope this helps,   Captain_WD.

2X8GB at 1600.
 
Once you get it stable and happy then you can start bumping ram voltage and try to get it to 1866.

im the guy who posted them

Raise the CPU manual voltage to 1.488(look at CPU-Z voltage when under load) Thats more important.
Raise CPU/NB to 1.25
Enable HPC
Raise Ram Voltage to 1.525
 
It may take 1.5-1.55V to get to 5Ghz stable.
 
Running that ram that slow it hurt performance. Also only run 2 dimms if possible.