CPU - I5 2500k
Cooler - 212+
Motherboard - MSI P67A-C43(B3)
PSU - Antec Green 650W
Video Card - Gigabyte GTX 560Ti
Memory - G.Skill 8GB 1333
Case - HAF912
Optical Drive - Asus DVDRW
HDD - 1 TB Seagate 7200rpm Sata 6.0Gb/s
It took an all night mission last week to work the kinks out, but everything seems to be behaving for long enough to snap some pictures with my wife's droid and upload them.
Some Pictures
http://imgur.com/a/LzFa0#jjzFs Little Album Of The Finished Rig
http://i.imgur.com/6h0t7.jpg Non-Modular Behind The Motherboard Aftermath
One question I do have is in relation to the video card. Bad Company 2 seems to crash it... a lot. Googling seems to have uncovered an ongoing argument as to the cause of this. Most people claim that nvidia's drivers don't get along with BC:2 when it comes to 560ti cards, while others claim that someone's been asleep at the wheel over at Gigabyte when it comes to quality control of their 560 Ti OC and SOC models.
To try and determine whether or not I should just RMA the card, I downloaded Metro 2033 and ran the game on the highest settings possible for more than an hour to see if it crashed or overheated my card. With the fan turned up to 100%, my 560 ti OC never went above 57 degrees... a damn good temperature considering the stress 2033 puts on your system. Next I ran the 2033 benchmark tool at least a dozen times at max settings, also never crashed. The minimum framerates I saw on 2033 with my 560ti were in the 15-16fps range with an average of around 30. I was impressed with my little rig considering how ridiculous 2033's graphics get.
Next I opened up BC:2's settings file, and switched the DX level to DX11 (as opposed to "auto") after some people over at reddit claimed to have success in getting their 560's to behave via this method. I seem to be having better luck, being able to run BC:2 for more than an hour without a crash in most instances. However, it does still do it from time to time.
Tl;Dr - Should I just RMA the damn thing to be sure I'm not playing with a faulty card?