pyrojoe34

For the cooler I would personally not bother going with an AIO unless it's at least 240mm. With 120mm AIOs you'd get better cooling for much cheaper (and less to break) with a decent air cooler.
 
FYI, even with a 1080Ti, a lot of modern games will struggle to get 60fps at 4k with completely maxed out settings. For example, PUBG and Wildlands... it just won't happen. Other well optimized games like BF1 and any older games should be fine but don't expect 4k/60 maxed out with every game.

Not only, for CPUs it's also limited by the number of active cores and the power draw. Even if you have the CPU sitting at 50C with great cooling, when you have all cores active it won't go above 4Ghz unless you OC.
 
For GPUs the boost is mostly limited to temperature and power draw and core count doesn't matter.

Definitely just wait another generation unless you have so much money that $700 is nothing to you. The 980Ti is plenty powerful and waiting another generation will give you much more bang for the buck.

Only for gaming. In multi-threaded applications the 5960x is still faster. Having said that... it's only 10% faster which means the price is not worth it at all. That and a R7 1800x would beat it in multithreaded apps for much less as well.
 
OP... can you get a refund?

It would be fine for a non-OCed CPU but IMO a 120mm AIO is not really worth it. I'd rather go with a good air cooler instead since that will beat out a 120mm AIO and cost significantly less (also less issues on the long run). I personally find that the AIOs aren't really worth it unless you get at least a 240mm.

Take a chopstick, cut it to size, paint it black (if you want), place it under the GPU to keep it from sagging.

Yea, you'll be fine. People fixate too much on the whole "bottlenecking" argument without really understanding what it means. Unless you have an extra $100 to burn on the 8600k + Z370 board then go with the 8400 + B350 board. You will be just fine and have a great system.

Right, but then you're just switching the bottleneck from the CPU to the GPU, one of the two will bottleneck in any situation. The point is that the 8400 will not be a significant bottleneck for the 1080Ti (unless he's playing at like 240Hz), even at 144Hz. If you have to choose between the 8400 (+ B350) with a 1080Ti, or a 8600k (+ Z370) with a 1080, for close to the same price, then the 8400 system will win every gaming benchmark and have a significantly higher price to performance ratio. That's the point.

What are you talking, the 6c6t i5 is almost on par with 7700k in gaming performance, 1080TI will not be bottlenecked by i5 8400

Do you have the Night Light enabled in Windows? Or is the option greyed out?

I understand this. I still stand by my statement. With the exception of tests made to specifically enhance the effect I don't believe (obviously it would need to be properly tested to be sure) that even professionals would be able to tell the difference reliably in games.

Not really... I'd take a 4-5ms IPS monitor over a 1ms TN monitor 100% of the time. The vast majority of people (and I'm willing to bet even pro gamers in a true double blind experiment) would see no difference between 4ms and 1ms.

Usually the difference between the two pump modes makes almost no difference in temperature. I keep both of mine at quiet. However the stock fan curves for the Corsair AIOs are pretty bad so you should make a custom fan curve for it.

It's hard to build for people who are less tech-savy because you really want it to be as simple as possible. If it was my build I'd make some changes but you have to understand where in-experienced people are coming from.

Oh I know, I OC all my PCs right off the bat... it's just different when building with a newbie. You have to ease them into it because they are often very weary about OCing a brand new $1000+ build with no experience.

Wait for the 8600(k) coming out soon, it'll be much better than the current i5s

From what I have seen the Docsis 3.1 modems are going to be over $100. So you need to up your budget if you want a "Gigabit modem". The SB6190 has the Intel puma 6 chip in it, which has a bad flaw. They have been saying they were going to release new firmware, but its been almost 2 years and I have not heard of any firmware being released. You want to stay away from any Puma 6 chip modems period. Ive heard the CM600 from Netgear is good. But Is generally $129 from what I have seen and will not do Gigabit. 
 
Also, Comcast will not do Gigabit over Docsis 3.0. So dont think because the modem is rated for Gigabit that you can get it. Those ratings are bull shit at best. Because its the Cable Provider that will say how fast they will provision the modem. For example the SB6141 can do up to 383Mbps down. They will NOT provision it past 200Mbps. 

I have the same one. If it's a legit Samsung you should have better speeds.
 
Go to your motherboard's website (or laptop if it's a laptop) and download the latest USB 3.0 drivers from there. Also make sure you're actually plugging it into a USB 3.0 port since some of them might be 2.0. Finally, if it's a desktop front port, make sure your connected to the 3.0 header on the board and not a 2.0 header, also make sure the BIOS is set to 3.0 and not 2.0.

I have my 980 at 1500Mhz (from like 1240Mhz stock) on an H80i v2 and it never gets above 73C. They work pretty well. The only thing to make sure with using AIOs on GPUs is it only cools the core itself, not the RAM or VRM so make sure they're properly cooled.
 
 
wrong post, sorry...
 
Delete comment.

That's strange because when I got G-sync the difference I noticed was absolutely huge (especially at lower framerates), less tearing/frame-drops and smoother gaming overall. The other advantage that may be a lot harder to notice for many is g-sync has much lower latency than v-sync.
 
When comparing the two, did you actually turn off g-sync in the control panel? Turning on v-sync doesn't disable g-sync so you may just be running both simultaneously. Also you'll only notice the difference if you're running at a lower fps than your monitor's refresh rate, g-sync doesn't do anything if your fps is already higher than the refresh rate.
 

Wait for the 8600(k) coming out soon, it'll be much better than the current i5s

This is what you should expect with the 500GB 960 Evo:
 

 
So your CrystalMark benchmark is right where it should be.

That's definitely the best bet. Let us know what you think.

No POST. Chances are if the board POSTs fine then the scratches are not an issue. For the most part a mobo (or specific components on it) either work or they don't, in most cases there's no "performance loss", it just doesn't work at all.

Just because it's 3.0 doesn't mean it can do 3.0 speeds. Modern HDDs are SATA 6.0Gbps but they can usually barely do 1-2Gbps.
 
If you're sure it's supposed to be faster then make sure your BIOS is set to have those ports at 3.0 and make sure you have the 3.0 drivers installed.