To answer a few questions.
Yes I play games of course but I also do video encoding work , or re encoding to be more accurate and sometime do some 3D modelling. For these later tasks my new PC is around 30% faster than my previous one (first generation i7 920 overclocked to 3.675) and I can run more multiple sessions of my encoding software on the new machine because of the extra cores, so over all I can pretty much get twice as much encoding done in the same time as my previous machine. As to the RAM, it makes no sense to use less than 4GB chips and I want the benefits of quad channel so 16GB is actually pretty much the minimum sensible ram to put in such a machine in my view. I did consider going for 8GB chips and having a total ram of 32GB but decided that was excessive
As to the oculus rift no I am not currently a games developer but in the past I was. Right now I am using it primarily to play Elite Dangerous (beta - soon to go gamma) which actually has very good support for it right now. I am also playing the early alpha of Star Citizen that does not currently have DK2 support but should have soon. However I did not buy it as a 'finished product' ready to use with a range of top tier games in place that support it, because it is not.
I knew it was and is an early prototype aimed at developers and I bought it as such and enjoy it as such.
As for my choice of case, well unlike all the internals it is not viable to have a case shipped here from the UK, the size and weight of it makes the shipping more expensive than the case itself, so it was the most suitable one given the limited local options available to me. If I had been in the UK it would not have been my first choice.
As to noise, actually the machine is very quiet, it has two 240mm fans on the case that are near silent , the cpu is cooled by a water block with a 120mm fan on the radiator. Most noise is from the two fans on the GPU under heavy load but even then the nvidia 970 (and more expensive 980) is actually very efficient in terms of heat (and therefore noise) to power relative to both earlier generations of nvidia cards and even more so relative to current AMD equivalents.
As to what it cost the components listed above - the case were £1273.27.
OK they were £1273.27 + 19% vat as well = £1515.19
OK they were £1515.19 + £79 shipping = just under £1600.
And the Oculus Rift is cool ... but unless you are a game developer it seems to me like a waste of money. A year from now there will be several products like that out, better and cheaper... and at the moment it seems that all you can do is play some demos and mini games... or did they make something better by now?
