SwingLifeAway92

If you have a local ecycle place near you sometimes they'll have some pretty good deals on older servers that can easily be converted to most of your needs. When it comes to actually building servers things tend to cost more than salvaging prebuilt.

Ah didn't read that my bad

Best bang for your buck are used cpus x5650s if you can find a board for a reasonable price its old yes but 6 cores 12 threads easily able to overclock above 4.0ghz (have to overclock it otherwise the cpus not worth the effort) which is a little bellow 3770 single core speeds. I've done multiple builds with them and usually I spend 150-200 on the cpu motherboard and ram all together. Anything above that price point would warrant either Ryzen 5 now or waiting for coffee lake stock to come in as just about every used quad core is overpriced as hell unless you buy locally off swap sites.

@Cyberspirit Oh trust me if you get in to custom watercooling you get to see the worst side of it... So custom loop kits are really amazing for what you get for the price but, tend to be the bare minimum. When you jump in to high end water cooling things just get crazy. To put it in it perspective most high end loops the fittings cost about half or more of the whole entire loop (yes the thing that only connects the tubes to your parts) So basically a normal high end soft or rigid can easilly be 150-300 in fittings while those hardline with no bends and all 90 degree adapters easily hit 300-400 bucks.

@Cyberspirit I think 3 should be good you can always add more if needed. Oh trust me I know my system now is from years of slowly upgrading things here and their. That's how it usually goes though people tend to start with a modest budget build and either stick with it until they replace almost all of it or like you and I slowly upgrade everything in it one at a time until they have an insanely expensive system.

Yeah then go with the vardar plus you'll wind up with some good radiator fans if you ever decide to do a custom loop or get an aio which is always a plus!

Vardar are typically meant for radiators hence the high rpm and being made by a watercooling company. I've only used the ones that come in kits for a few builds personally they're great for radiator fans they push a lot of air and are fairly quite. As far as noise as a normal case fan they're above average but nothing great (they also will require doing some fan control settings on motherboard or resistors) it really boils down to if having white fans outweighs the little bit of extra sound.

Nah like gpus prices are supposed to go up soon due to gddr5 shortages after supplies being cut

Honestly I'd go with the ekwb I have one solid block and trustworthy. I personally don't know anything about barrows but, most people I know who've bought sub $100 gpu blocks have never had a good time afterwards and usually regretted fairly soon after.

Oh wow yeah I looked at their site a week or 2 ago and they were in stock so hopefully soon but who knows with these whispers of gddr5 shortages.

4790k is a solid cpu runs hotter than the sun when overclocked However they haven't gone down much in price so I would say wait till October when coffee lake comes out that might drop the prices of Haswell.

You can try ordering directly through Nvidia or one of their partners.

I actually bought a vega 64 since i had a 500 gift card to microcenter from when I sold my gtx 1080 Ftw to a friend of mine. I have a custom loop and they don't sell founders cards there anymore and there's hardly any waterblocks for non founders cards that aren't ugly as sin. So I saw an open boxed vega 64 (payed $620) and said what the hell I got a month to return it. It's a solid card and performs just like my 1080 did might consume more power but I unlocked the voltage on my previous one anyways so I don't really care about that. If you have to choose between vega or 1080/1080ti realistically team green hands down but, if you want to try team red out or just spice it up I'd say grab a vega 56 as its a smarter buy or if you aren't pressed on money go ahead and get the 64