Friend is going to be ordering a new build friday, needtips.

I need a compatibility check to be sure its a good setup he has here, he wants to have his system last long, his GPU is going to be the 970. is this a working set up?

some reason the amazon list is showing my name, my bad.,

The Corsair Vengeance 8gb looks to be a single stick of RAM. You would get better performance if you had 2x4gb of RAM so as to be running it in dual channel mode. As it is, you will be running the memory in single channel mode. That's the main change I would suggest.

Of less significance is the choice of the PSU. If longevity is your goal then I would spend that same amount of money on a Seasonic or an EVGA brand PSU. And with only one video card you could get away with a 600W PSU easy. Don't get me wrong. Corsair makes better PSUs than a lot of folks but they aren't the best.

What is the main purpose of this computer being upgraded? Is it mainly for gaming? If so the i5 CPU is certainly appropriate but if for more CPU intensive tasks like AV editing, Photoshop, or CAD you might want to move up to an I7 because of the hyper threading technology performance boost.

It's going to be a new build, he stopped pc gaming awhile ago, and now he wants a GREAT running pc, fast boot times, with no fps issues, we use to game together doing everquest, lineage, dransik, lineage 2, wow, cs, and now he wants to get back into it all.

Drop the Hero, get a Z97 Extreme4.

Go 2x4GB on the RAM. I like G.SKILL Ares 2133MHz CL9.
The Ares is low profile, which helps if he wants a good heatsink later.

The RM series isn't as good as the EVGA SuperNova G2.
And the SuperNova costs less. And has a better warranty.

Look 4690K instead of 4670K.

For the GPU, look at the EVGA models with the ACX 2.0 cooler.

For not much more you could go Maximus VII Hero and a i5-4690K, which gets him to the latest Z97 socket 1150 platform.

Lvcoyote said:

For not much more you could go Maximus VII Hero and a i5-4690K, which gets him to the latest Z97 socket 1150 platform.

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I'd still drop the Hero and go Extreme4.
Having owned both a Hero and Extreme6, I say with the utmost confidence that the Extreme4 and Extreme6 are better boards.

Yea, the ASRock boards are fine and usually priced a little better, but I've always had good luck with the ASUS boards too. I guess it's a matter of what you can afford and what features you want.

Def go extreme 4 (ASRock). Spending more is sorta senseless and more for e-peen than anything else

Lvcoyote said:

Yea, the ASRock boards are fine and usually priced a little better, but I've always had good luck with the ASUS boards too. I guess it's a matter of what you can afford and what features you want.

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To me the Hero is an in-between board. Not good enough to be classified with the rest of the Maximus products, but still carries the premium price tag.