Maxxtraxx

For the money that is not a bad choice. It will serve you well.

​If it fits in your case and works with your cpu choice... yes it would be fine... that is a huge cooler.

​Yes, absolutely.

EVGA water cooled card options here. Corsair CPU cooling here.

These are just simple recommendations, ​For the cpu the Corsair h100i gtx is a simple choice with excellent cooling(there are many other options as well that perform similar). For the graphics card, if you choose Nvidia then EVGA sells many cards with aio water cooling already installed or available for purchase separately. If you choose AMD then most cards are air cooled but the r9 fury x is factory liquid cooled.

Looks good overall, however I feel that a more powerful graphics card would be advisable (980, 980ti, titan x, r9 390x, r9 fury, r9 fury x). That cpu cooler is great, I have a i5 2500k running at 4.5ghz all day on the hyper 212 plus(the older/not as good version)

I am saying this in the most respectful way possible. From the questions you've put to us and the level of knowledge and experience that it implies I would recommend that you stick to either excellent air cooled options or AIO(all in one) liquid coolers. The level of complexity and potential for catastrophic damage and problems is much much higher with custom water cooling.

If you plan to use an EK full cover waterblock you need to check compatibility, many of the non reference design cards use a custom made circuit board that a reference design waterblock will not fit unless EK specifically says so. Remember there is no guarantee you'll be able to get even 1 Mhz above stock clocks, overclocking is simply extra performance when possible, the silicon lottery determines what your card is capable of with no guarantees.

If you do not wish to overclock yourself many of the partners(like EVGA, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI) offer factory overclocked 980ti cards that will offer performance within a few percentage points of a titan x.

Two 980ti's will provide approx 170% of the performance of a single titan x. Remember the titan x and the 980ti are the same gpu with the titan having slightly more of the chip enabled/functioning. The 980ti also has the benefit of better partner pcb's with better power delivery and better cooling options.

A 980ti will provide nearly identical performance to the titan x when overclocked, the titan x is more about the price is no object best of the best being a priority(though with poor factory cooling).

​From your description you've met the PSU wattage requirement and the board has a pci express 16x slot. So long as you choose a card that will fit in your case... then you'll be fine.

Well, you have made a few assumptions here. There is no guarantee that getting a 980ti Poseidon that you can get 1522mhz, thats not how the silicon lottery works The temperature difference is a bit easier to predict but also heavily dependent on the card, the cooler, your case and your usage. The stability of an overclock is not determined by the card itself but the testing and verification of the system stability by you, the person doing the overclocking. Any 980ti will play witcher 3 well regardless of brand The big questions to answer are 1: are you going to put the money and effort into doing a custom liquid loop? 2: would you rather use an easier to build/use AIO liquid cooler, from brands like EVGA, gigabyte, MSI, ect. 3: are you willing to pay extra for a better binned AISC valued card for the theoretical potential of better overclocking.

​hmm, I would say that the case's fan hub should not be plugged into the cpu header, but if the case has a variable speed controller that it should be plugged directly into the psu as to not overdraw any of the motherboard fan headers. I would recommend that if your using a newer motherboard with onboard fan speed controls based off system temperatures then it would be better to use that than a fan hub. As far as the pump overdrawing, I believe that my h100i gtx has a separate power cable that plugs into a sata power connector to pull its power from so overdrawing the cpu fan header should not be an issue since it does not get its primary power from there.

agreed!​

Yeah, seems to be a solid choice in the 80-100 dollar range.

Well fps per dollar is what you're after I assume, this is a pretty good choice.

Can I link ebay here? I will gladly delete this if not. Example A Example B

With some shopping used and with a good deal some Gtx760's can be had for around $100, may be a good choice if you can find one.

I would recommend plugging the fans into the splitter cable going to the pump and the cpu wire into the cpu header, through the corsair link software you can control the pump speed and fan curves to your desires. Be sure to plug the pump into a sata power supply cable also. Have fun and enjoy the low cpu temps!

Wow, beautiful card! I really like the looks of Gigabyte's recent designs. Great job on the overclocks as well, it seems that anything over 1,500Mhz is very good.

When fully overclocked a good 970 will match a nonoverclocked 980 but not an overclocked 980. I would not recommend any 970 at a $400 price point even as much as I loved mine, at the current level of performance it should be priced at $275-$300 to be a "good deal". If your interested in some of the free games that are being offered for free with some of the 970's then at the 300-330 price range they are more lucrative but still behind the similarly priced r9 390 in most gaming it seems.

Cool, so I see your point. With the production nodes being stuck at 28nm for a few years nvidia has been optimizing the consumer cards for graphics at the cost of removing hardware that is nonessential to that purpose and thus reducing the overall "allround" performance for a very focused graphics goal at the cost of "compute performance/fp64/ect". Though following nvidia's generational improvement style, that is the performance level of gen A's top tier card being gen B's 2nd place card it would naturally flow 580/670/760/950 so those cards should theoretically all offer a similar level of performance in graphics but as you said at the cost of all round performance. In my eyes this seems like a wise choice, to optimize your products to do what they are primarily used for above all other goals and it seems their sales and graphics market performance has shown how successful their push to focus on their primary goal has been.

Are these hardware features nonessential to gaming? Is FP64 performance used heavily in gaming? Is it right to say that Nvidia's current consumer cards are focused primarily on delivering gaming performance whereas they have an entirely different lineup designed to deliver performance for FP64 and other business/commercial related goals? What is the oldest card that Nvidia currently supports with drivers?

I seriously doubt it would be a worthwhile endeavor, it may be interesting but of no real use... but then again if you mounted a cupcake dispenser in the 5.25in bay, that would be a very interesting endeavor and possibly very worthwhile!