After having my worries taken care of by a handful of awesomesauce guys in the Computer Build Help section, I finally had a "midsummer Christmas"-moment after a 72-hour delay (the online store I bought the parts from had a datacenter failure the day before they would otherwise have sent them to me, argh!)...
- Case: Cooler Master CM Storm Enforcer
- Power Supply: Corsair Enthusiast Series Modular TX550M
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H
- CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K
- Heat Sink Fan: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo
- Memory: Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz 8GB (Kit w/2x 4GB, CL9-9-9-24, 1.5v)
- Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 2GB PhysX CUDA
- Optical Drive: ASUS DRW-24B5ST DVD±RW Writer
- Solid State Drive: Crucial m4 256 Gb 2.5" Solid State Disk
- Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
People are probably turning in their future graves at the lovely result of my first-time attempt at thermal compound application. It was probably also the one thing I was most nerveous about with the whole self-build and not using a stock cooler solution, with the Interwebs having various examples of the best way to do it and "less being more", but I went with how the installation leaflet told me how to do it. Not that I have any idea about ideal temperatures, but I think it works well enough; core temperatures at idle are about 32°C and slightly above 62°C a few hours into a Prime95 blend test.
Cable management I sort of gave up on half-way through... meh.
I had a lot of problems with the computer freezing irregularly; sometimes I couldn't even make it into BIOS, other times it would happen after a short or long time in BIOS or Windows. According to Google I was far from the only one having/having had that problem. Long story short... "BCLK at 100.1" seems to have been my savior. Phew! Need to cancel my RMA request on Monday.