Advice on summer build?

[douchecanoe]

Looking for suggestions for my plan to overhaul my current rig in the summer. This Athlon II and 5770 ain't cutting it anymore

Here's what I've got in mind:

Thoughts? As you can see I'm going for a kind of blue themed build. My only concern is fitting the Phanteks cooler into the TJ08-E. My other choice for a case was the Fractal Define Mini, but I like the Silverstone better. Also, I know what you're thinking "Get a 3570k, you don't need an i7"; I know the mantra, however, I know I want the i7, just trust me on this one

My dilemma is

• Do I wait for Haswell? Will the 10% performance increase but increased TDP be worth it? (At least that's what I hear) Will Haswell bring more cool features like more prevalent Thunderbolt?
  
• Do I buy AMD for the CPU? People keep saying that they are higher performance but I'm not sure what to believe
  
• Do I wait for GTX700 or AMD8000? Since Premiere CS7 is going to support OpenCL and AMD cards for accelerated rendering then I don't even need to get Nvidia (Although I would like the card to be blue, because I'm shallow)
  

And these are the things that keep me up at night...

Does anyone have any input though?

[bradscoolio]

• Haswell unfortunately looks like a big let down, 10% berformance was all that was gained from going to Ivy from sandy and that still performs pretty much equal when both are overclocked to their respected speeds (sandy is a better overclocker).
  
• If you're willing to wait till CS7 then go for the 7970 and get some cool games, Logan from teksyndicate mentioned that the OpenCL accelerated rendering engine is like 20% faster than the CUDA accelerated millennium engine.
  
• Unless you're planing to go dual cards in the future then i suggest getting like a 600w psu because you don't need as many watts as you think, this'll save you money and still leave tones of room for overclocking.
  
• Get more ram than that, the speed will only make a small difference in some abstract situation that you'll likely never come across. It'll be more beneficial for you to get a 16gb kit or a 32gb kit of 1333mhz then be able to do multiple things at once with multiple intensive programs and not run out of memory ;)
  
• Linus just talked about on the live stream and he's mentioned in the past the horrid mounting mechanism on tht phanteks cooler, so I'd get a noctua nh-d14 that'll perform, won't take an hour to mount and will scale better in temps when you turn the fans down for silence xD
  

Now you're good, have fun with the build douche!

[douchecanoe]

Thanks for the feeback!

I've noted your first 3 points, will take into consideration

With the RAM though, the prices seem abnormally high right now, so getting 16gb is ridiculous. My thinking was get the 8gb now just to have it, and later when prices aren't so high get a second kit of 8gb

Didn't know about the Phanteks having so many issues, but I'm conflicted because it's sooooo sexy. Will take some thought...

Thanks again!

[bradscoolio]

No problem dude xD