Daniel Borau

I would like to help too, last year I was to put me into modding in a serious way but some Real Life events put me aside to do it, from one of them (a 4-month course for the unemployed and 164+ hours of internship in a company) I became familiar with GIMP and to the decal creation, so on those kind of things I can lend a hand (and I'm in some kind of trouble with the F4U-5N/NL for the KAW mod, VC3 I hate you!!). Also if test pilots are needed i can volunteer to not crash the aircraft on the take off A must have to do is to fix the odd behavior of the 4 engine prop aircraft FM on hard. IMHO the sim needs some changes (especially on the loadout options screen, 6 weapon stations ID's and the Tornado says it all), and to add some things to make it more complete, yes, I plead guilty, I am one of those who likes to fly big slumbering bombers, tankers and AEW planes .

The CoolerMaster GM and V semi modular series are good (that will depends on your budget), the model Wattage to choose depends on the CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD and HDD overall consumption, you can have less cables and the essential components connected to it and they have a good efficiency curve, i.e. with the V450/G450M you have room to run the GTX 960/GTX 970 without problems, as the GTX960 needs 120W and the GTX970 145W, the 4690 needs 84W to work, then the drives are around 4.35W for the Kingston Savage SSD on writing, The less expensive Fury are 2.76W and storage drives like WD Green are between 1.7W~5.3W on reading/writing, depends on the model. But if you want to upgrade later the V550/G550M PSU are best. I ommited the RAM consumption because it'll depends on the type you like to use (1333MHz or 1600MHz).

As I'm not able to edit my post(?), on the AMD Motherboards you can choose: Asus M5A99FX Pro R2.0. Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0. ASRock 970 Extreme 4. Asrock 990FX Extreme3 Gigabyte GA-990XA-UD3. Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Rev 4.0. MSI 970 Gaming. MSI 990 FXA Gaming. I looked at the differences between the i5 4690/4690K and the AMD FX series @95W about power consumption and is around 11W to 4960 and 7W to 4690K more power thirsty, it's not a big deal compared to graphic cards consumption, and you can save around $40, or even more, depending your budget, here is a list of FX processors: AMD FX 8-Core Black Edition FX-8370E FD837EWMW8KHK Cores: 8 Speed/Max: 3.3 GHz/3.6 GHz TDP: 95W Socket: AM3+ AMD FX 8-Core Black Edition FX-8320E FD832EWMW8KHK Cores: 8 Speed/Max: 3.2 GHz/3.5 GHz TDP: 95W Socket: AM3+ AMD FX 8-Core Black Edition FX-8310 FD8310WMW8KHK Cores: 8 Speed/Max: 3.4 GHz/4.3 GHz TDP: 95W Socket: AM3+ AMD FX 6-Core Black Edition FX 6100 FD6100WMW6KGU Cores: 6 Speed/Max: 3.3 GHz/3.9 GHz TDP: 95W Socket: AM3+ AMD FX 4-Core Black Edition FX-4100 FD4100WMW4KGU Cores: 4 Speed/Max: 3.6 GHz/3.8 GHz TDP: 95W Socket: AM3+ AMD FX 4-Core Black Edition FX-4300 FD4300WMW4MHK Cores: 4 Speed/Max: 3.8 GHz/4 GHz TDP: 95W Socket: AM3+ AMD FX 8-Core Black Edition FX-8300 FD8300WMW8KHK Cores: 8 Speed/Max: 3.3 GHz/4.2 GHz TDP: 95W Socket: AM3+ With them you can use a wide range of RAM Modules ranging from 1066MHz to 1866MHz (also depending your budget). For the tropical weather, Liquid Cooling is a good friend, Antec and Cooler Master have good systems at reasonably prices, and for the coolant you can use car coolant, in my case I had to switch to LC because I live in front the Sahara Desert, the floating dust on ambient from some continental winds hitting the Atlantic is a pain to clean on an conventional CPU fan, and not to tell the temperatures when the island is covered with dust clouds.

I checked the Video Cards you're looking for, and I recommend you to buy an 750W ~ 800W PSU to run without problems because: The 760 needs 225W, the 960 needs 150W (?), and the R9 needs at least 300W to run. For the processor and the motherboard, you should take a look to AMD am3+ stuff, you'll find a more game-oriented stuff than Intel, around the same prices (or less).