Hey everyone. This will be my first time building my own system. Been wanting to for years but just never had the time. Now it's time for an upgrade and I don't want another locked down OEM box full of bloatware. The first parts I'm wanting to get are the motherboard and case. I've been looking at the Z77 chipset boards and have narrowed down my brand preference to either ASUS or Gigabyte. Just wanted to get some opinions/recommendations from the community on specific board choices from those two brands. Also, please give me some case recommendations as well. Mid to mid-high end. Nothing budget. For reference, here is what I will be using this setup for. Very light gaming but a lot of HD editing and encoding, photoshop editing, etc. Will be using an i7 CPU. I'm not too concerned about having storage expansion in the case as I already have an 8-disk RAID 5 enclosure setup for that. I will be putting a good graphics card (will need advice on that as well) on the system and plan on supporting at least 3 monitors. Please let me know if there is any more information I can give you as to what I am wanting to do. Thanks in advance for all your help! Carl
Yeah, that's kind of what I was leaning towards, specifically this one: GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD5H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 Any recommendations on cases?
If you are able to buy one, then i would definitely recommend either an Fractal Design Define R3 (or newer, R4) and Fractal Design Arc Midi. If you like to build an pretty silent computer with an goof airflow then you would love to at least read reviews (or watch from youtube) from R3. If you are not considered to need whisper silence, then Arc Midi would make the job done also. Midi has even better air cooling, as well as it has pretty decent water cooling possibilities, but depending about your hardware and fans you choose/use it's bit noisier. What comes to choosing an motherboard, i don't see much difference in between Asus Gigabyte. Both are going to work fine and well, if you are aiming into overclocking, then i would try to find an reviews from both. You could also get an good value/price performance from ASRock, and them are performing awesome now a days. As in final thought, i would check which manufacturer would give most things in same value. And there's also two more companies that builds great products as well are ECS (Elitegroup) and MSI. Z77H2-A2X as an example from ECS.
