I'm building a $700 gaming PC to finally ascend. Help me out by critiquing my design and answering a few questions about the EVGA GQ 650W, Thermaltake Core V1 and more!

Thanks a lot for the help and advice! And that's particularly good to hear about the great cooling too.

I'm thinking about just forking over more money for the whole build (mostly for a better 144hz monitor than Razeraa's suggestion) since I actually have it and just didn't want to spend more. But I have a question about the G4560 -vs- the i5's too.

Let's say that I'm perfectly fine with playing on medium - high settings, want to reach 60fps @ 1080p, don't mind dipping a little below that since I'll have free-sync, and am not particularly interested in CPU-demanding strategy games (I'm more RPG & FPS). Would you say that the hyper-threaded pentium would last me around 3 years? And if the truly next-generation consoles will be released around 3 years after Xbox Scorpion launches in November, would you say that the the i5 would last me around 5 years from today before I would want to upgrade? In consideration of Ryzen and the next-gen consoles' influence on increasing CPU utilization in games. (Real question, I want to know if you think those time estimates for total use are accurate.)

I've been going back and forth between the pentium and i5 for a while now, and I've been calculating the cost / time for both. So far, they look pretty even, although the i5 definitely has a higher up-front cost.

And regarding the SSD, I want to have one in the initial build because this machine is going to be my workhorse for schoolwork and other stuff too. I guess I could possibly downgrade it to just 256gb, but then I might regret it later on as games increase in size to where you can't have as many installed there at once for faster loading times.

Idk, what do you think? An i5 would definitely be a better bet for people who want to play strategy games or on very high ~ ultra settings in general for as long as possible before upgrading, but it doesn't seem like it would be as essential for my use case and requirements. And I'm not going to be doing any streaming or photo / video editing, so that's not really a factor either.

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