Hi all I'm looking to upgrade from my trusty Q6600 setup soon to ivy bridge. I've done my research and these look to be very good performance for their price. Intel Core i5 3570K - £180 Asus MAXIMUS V GENE Z77 - £153 Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz CL9 1.5V - £76 Total - £409 Main uses for PC are Gaming, Blu-Ray re-encoding (rip from disc, shrink and store), and running 5-10 VM's at once for training purposes (hence need for 16GB RAM). Just wanted to run it by you guys for your opinion and I also need to decide on a CPU cooler, not really sure what to go for. The "Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev 2" seems very popular? Most important thing will be that it will fit on the V GENE with all 4 RAM slots fitted, after that, as long as its reasonably quiet I'm not too fussed (not sure if I will overclock immediately, probably wont be able to resist though!). Thanks!
If you're worried about ram clearance, you could just get the Low Profile RAM here, or the 2 x 8GB version here, although it is a bit more expensive, however there is room to add more and using up all 4 DIMM slots can affect overclock stabilities. A good cooler is the Arctic i30, its unbeatable at its price range (£30)
I bought much the same set up as you the other day. Get the i30 cooler, but just check the sizes first. It is very very big. To the point that there is only about 1cm clearance in my Antec 900-2.
Thanks for the suggestions, that 2x8GB RAM bundle is very good price actually, not a great deal more and like you say, better for overclocking and also leaves possibility of an easy upgrade to 32GB in the future. I'll check out that cooler, see if i can get a definite answer on it fitting or not. Another thing I will have to consider is that I'm currently using a large tower case but I'm consider moving to a small mico-atx case in the future (something much smaller and light).
