blazerclaw

Yeah, definitely go for the 390 it performs a bit better and will let you run 1440p games.

Just a heads up, the Strafe RGB is $129.99 at Best Buy, and if you're a student there is a coupon for $40 off Cosair keyboards if you sign up for student deals with an .edu email. I just got a new Strafe RGB for $89.99 before tax. The thing is it doesn't work online for whatever reason, so you'll have to go to your nearest Best Buy store and show them the coupon to ring it up, which works fine with no hassles.

SLI is actually slower in certain games, for the cost honestly I would sell my current card, add on the amount I was going to spend on the extra card in order to get better performance and less issues across the board.

At the temps you want of 50-60c it's going to be low 4 GHz range, but as everyone else has stated, it all the defers between each chip, so hope to win the silicon lottery. I personally lost the lottery with my card being stable at 4.3 GHz with a 1.26v , with temps ranging mid to high 60s.

Get a bigger capacity SSD or upgrade your case. Honestly you should be fine with your PSU. A case I would recommend is the Enthoo Luxe, recently upgraded my case to this one and I love it.

Like others have said it's build quality too, not just acoustics. In the end either card will get the job done at 1080p and 1440p.

I would definitely go with the MSI or Sapphire variant of this card. XFX is in the middle of the pack quaility wise. Unfortunately the ASUS variant has very bad cooling fans making it run hot, which in turn also makes it hard to overclock.

Oh no.......

Depending on what colors your motherboard, fans, or leds are I would go with colors that compliment them. If you really don't care or plan on matching the other parts with the same color scheme, I would go with white and blue.

Definitely the XFX, since the STRIX's fans are totally crap and makes the card run very hot.

Yes! This a hundred times! when I was building my computer for the first time a couple of years ago I did not test my components outside case and just built it as is... Well as you can probably imagine I had to take apart again to see what part had to RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) which is replace the broken part. Since it was my first build took me a couple of hours to build and to that over again was not fun, after I replaced the part. So follow Alpha's advice completely so you can avoid hassles. Also as CBorjorges said, watch Linus's videos ( Which I personally used) and PCpartpicker in order to chose parts and check any incompatibilities issues. For any questions use the forum search function or just ask. Anyways good luck!

I'd definitely go for the R9 280, they usually hover around the $150-$200 depending on the model. But I would go for the 4GB models for a better performance.

I'm not able to check my ambient temperature atm, but it's very cool since I'm in a downstairs room. I'm running a open cooler design GPU the MSI R9 280X Twin Frozn, does really make a big impact or is it negligible?

Unfortunately, I lost the silicon lottery since my build crashes booting to windows when I try 4.5 GHz at 1.3V, so 1.275V doesn't seem like it would be able to hold up. Similar thing with 4.4 GHz, it won't boot at 1.26V, but it will at 1.30V, and for that I ran tests for 20 minutes it was stable for that amount of time, the temps were at low-mid 70s the max temp being 78c.