Tips or advice on building a gaming rig.

[MattsSoScene]

Hi everyone,

I have been slowly building a new comp and was hoping for any advice or tips that I could get to help me create the best rig possible. Here is what I have so far:

Case: Cooler Master HAF 922
Motherboard: Asus P8Z68-V\GEN3
Ram: Cosair Vengeance 16gb DDR3
I have two 1.5 TB hard drives. One is a Samsung, the other is a Seagate Barracuda
the top and front each have a 140mm fan, the back has 120mm fan and the sides have 2 120mm fans
Processor: Intel Core i5-2500k (this is my first question as I have been  told that I should be getting a much faster processor for the MOBO that I have)

The other places I am stuck on are how big of a power supply to get and how to pick the best graphics card.

I would also welcome any additional advice or tips anyone could give.

Thank you in advance.

[Hunter quest]

The basic graphics card formula is to find, plotted on a graph, the best performance to price ratio. You might have other desires too, like size, noise, or features. I read reviews to decide which card to get. My card ended up not supporting a very old CGA/EGA mode I wanted to use - and assumed would be present. No review is going to mention a thing like that, though. A good starting point for reviews is tomshardware.com.

I don't know what sort of power your existing choices pull, but IMO no more than 500W is necessary. If you really go bananas with the graphics cards or peripherals, you might make use of more, but this is uncommon.

Personally I would go for a solid state (fanless) 500W power supply. Lovely.