Hola,

I'm building my first pc and I wanted yout input, I've found your site very helpful and informative .
I live south of the border, Mexico to be exact, so components are hard to come by (any help appreciated) and I want a machine capable of gaming (mostly RTS like starcraft 2 and FPS like Battlefield 3), Rhino, CATIA and Autocad (in that order). Heres a list of the components I've chosen, I'll list prices in USD to give you an idea of the price difference. Also I would like to do overclocking on the CPU and, in the future, upgrade the GPU or SLI it.

CPU: Intel 2500k $231.66 USD
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H $167.37
RAM: 8Gb DDR3 Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz $62.52
GPU: Gigabyte nVidia 560Ti OC 1Gb $281.00
HDD: WD 1.5Tb 64Mb cache 7200rpm $130.15
Case: Coolermaster Elite 430 $59.00
PSU:Thermaltake Ttr 2 650w $113.24
Heatsink: Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO $44.60

Total: $1085.80 USD

I appreciate any help or input, as I said, I liked a lot the level of knowledge and experience you show guys and I know you will be very helpful to me (also you'll like the challenge of building a good mid-range pc with limited components and inflated prices)

If you could provide links to the parts it would help us to check them better. Everything looks compatible, but I would get a SSD for the OS and a few games, rather than the big expensive HDD. You will most likely see the most bottlenecking from your HDD, with long load times etc. Getting a SSD will improve those times by a good deal. You could probably get a nice 120GB SSD for aroun the $110 range, then either pick up a storage drive or wait to get one when the prices drop. Just a suggestion though.

That HDD is pretty damn expensive - that sucks about the prices. Definitely not easy to work around that.

Could you link us to the website you're picking parts on? I'd be happy to go through and see if we can work something even better out

Thanks for the reply,

Ill post links to newegg pages since I'm buying in Mexican stores. As for the HDD, the only way I got the money was to pitch the build as a "Home" computer for my family so I need the space. Maybe I'll get a SSD when I visit the States, the prices here are ridiculous! (around $120 for a 64 Gb!)

GPU
CPU
Case
MoBo
RAM (I actually changed it to Kingston HyperX Blu RAM)
PSU (Would I need to change it when I add the second GPU?) (how much power would you recommend if I stick to only one GPU?)
Heatsink
HDD

Thanks for the reply!

Yeah, it sucks!
I'm actually using 3 websites to hunt for parts:

Digitalife
Mipc
Pc Experts

The GPUs have been the most difficult to find.

Thanks man for the help!

Did you ever get this sorted? Do you need more specific help?