High-end gaming PC for Christmas - cooling question

[May90]

Yes, audio card is not necessary purely for quality sound if the motherboard already has a great audio. However, for purposes of musical studio a good audio card can be necessary, since MIDI output on motherboards is usually quite cheap, and their drivers are too primitive to really control the way your music sounds. Still, it is just a possibility in a far-far future, certainly not in the nearest 2 years.

Thank you very much for your overall help, many things are clear to me now. I will do just that by Christmas: order a PC by parts with 4790k, one 780 TI (or 880) and all the rest and then, if I need more performance, I will buy one more 780 TI eventually (or 880 if they are good).

[Eroginous]

Yes, audio card is not necessary purely for quality sound if the motherboard already has a great audio. However, for purposes of musical studio a good audio card can be necessary, since MIDI output on motherboards is usually quite cheap, and their drivers are too primitive to really control the way your music sounds. Still, it is just a possibility in a far-far future, certainly not in the nearest 2 years.

Thank you very much for your overall help, many things are clear to me now. I will do just that by Christmas: order a PC by parts with 4790k, one 780 TI (or 880) and all the rest and then, if I need more performance, I will buy one more 780 TI eventually (or 880 if they are good).

Just a heads up about running SLI: You should make sure the games you want to play will support it before committing the extra money to it. Some games take a performance hit because they don't properly support SLI and other games you won't notice any performance increase because they don't support it at all. It's difficult to find information on SLI compatibility with the games you did list, so I would def start with one card and see how your games play out before committing to another.

SC2 is especially CPU intensive and will run at high FPS/ultra settings on most graphics cards of this generation. I'm not sure about Bauldur's Gate series, but I'm willing to be those are more GPU intensive but probably old enough to run butter smooth on a single 780ti with settings maxed.

[May90]

Just a heads up about running SLI: You should make sure the games you want to play will support it before committing the extra money to it. Some games take a performance hit because they don't properly support SLI and other games you won't notice any performance increase because they don't support it at all. It's difficult to find information on SLI compatibility with the games you did list, so I would def start with one card and see how your games play out before committing to another.

SC2 is especially CPU intensive and will run at high FPS/ultra settings on most graphics cards of this generation. I'm not sure about Bauldur's Gate series, but I'm willing to be those are more GPU intensive but probably old enough to run butter smooth on a single 780ti with settings maxed.

Well, Baldur's Gate 2 is actually a game of 2002 so it should run well even on GeForce 2 MX. Starcraft 2 is, indeed, CPU intensive, but, unfortunately, the graphical part of the game is poorly optimized, so people report to have low FPS there in big battles even with the best CPU and GPU available - still, this FPS is definitely higher than with the lower equipment. But I am pretty sure that Starcraft 2 has a decent support of SLI - I remember people back in 2010 posting that they got about 50% more performance with 2 cards than with 1 similar.

On my current laptop I can run most games I play (mostly Bioware RPGs and Guild Wars 2, for example) on almost maxed settings with a decent FPS. But Dragon Age 3 is coming out soon and it should be very GPU intensive, probably should run fine on maxed settings on a single 780TI, but things like Supersampling, of course, will need to be ignored. Also Witcher 3 is reported to have less then 40 FPS in some cases on 780TI will all settings maxed out - although I haven't played the Witcher series yet, I am planning to soon. So, two 780TI will certainly not go to waste, but I wonder if the performance gain even in games with good SLI support is worth additional $700.

Anyway, I will certainly start with a single card and then see if I need one more.