Hailstorm II [Upcoming Purchase.]

Motherboard: The ASUS VI Extreme is one of the best overclocking boards out there, getting to 4.8GHz all depends on the CPU itself. 4.7GHz is more common.

Power Supply: The 1050W should be more than enough for 2x GPUs and the CPU overclocked. If you plan on adding a third card, then going with the 1200w would be necessary.

Storage: 512 GB SSD is plenty to start off with for an OS + some games. With games getting to 30+GB installs, you can install around 10 games and still have some room left over. As you stated, you can always add another driver later when needed.

Graphics Cards: If you're going with water cooling, you'll have to pick the reference design cards as the water blocks are made for them. You cannot water cool the ACX edition of the GTX 780Ti's

Sound: Going with a 7.1 vs 5.1 won't increase sound quality to the point that its noticeable. If you're not going with a surround setup, the Recon3D is plenty good.

Chassis Mods: The baseplate does not include sleeved cables but some of the cables on the PSU are sleeved black.

The Haswell is difficult to OC @ 4.5GHz or higher. I had mine OC'd to 4.5 but was having some issues when gaming so I down clocked it to 4.4 and haven't had any problems since. Very few of them would even reach a 4.8 OC (probably less than 5% of the chips would even be stable at this point). It has more to do with the capability of the CPU than the mobo. Looks like Nav & bp22 answered all the rest of your questions...

Thanks a lot for all the input, I really don't see myself upgrading to three cards any time soon. I'll probably just be gaming at the normal 1080p as I don't really see a need for me to jump to 1440p at this time.

I'm not really learned in the OCing world, so a lot of this information has been useful to me. Even if I only get 4.4Ghz out of my processor I think that'll be more than enough for what I need.

I've taken a look at the other motherboards but honestly I think I'll just stick with the Maximus VI, maybe I don't plan to upgrade to 3+ cards right at this moment but I'd like the option for the future. This will be the base build for all future upgrades that I choose to make.

With all this information I dropped the price of the build to around 6700, allowing me some breathing room as well as the planned extra order of white sleeved cabling.

Is there anything else that I'm missing? I'm not sure, but I'd like to think two GTX 780 Tis would be good enough for triple monitor gaming at 1080p...if not I could just wait on it. I can't see myself dishing out more money for a third at this time. As for the comments on the Maximus Formula VI, it looks like a great board. Actually probably one of my favorite looking boards. But is the sound comparable or as good as a 5.1 dedicated sound card?

It's all coming together and I'm super excited haha, can't wait to give Digital Storm a call and make the final purchase, but I want to make sure everything fits into place.

Originally posted by danjw1 I am not an audiophile, and haven't listened to either boards audio. The Formula has a higher Signal to Noise Ratio (120dB vs 102dB), which means it has a more accurate sound. They each have their on technologies, I can't speak to which would result in the best audio experience. In my experience, most people who talk about adding more graphics cards end up just replacing older ones with new ones. In the end I expect you will love whatever you end up doing.

Well then that just brings up the question if I'd ever have a need for 3 cards...if that is the case then I'd stick with the Extreme but if I'm just gonna swap out my cards for two diff ones later on it would make sense to go with the Formula motherboard...hrm. Well Seeing as how Digital storm is open now I guess I could always give them a call and discuss it with them. Along with some other things.

Love the input though, really helps me out.