There are items in your build that I wouldn't touch for love nor money. Seagate drives suck and are unreliable. WD Blacks all the way
Untrue. Their returns rates are nearly equal (within the a margin of error). The shipping probably has more to do with reliability. Plus, Seagate came to the market with 1TB platters first, which are definitively more reliable than the Nx500GB platters that WD uses.
ASRock is still a rather new entity and have yet to prove themselves to me. I have the X79 E11 M/B and there are still quite a few glitches in it. The XMP would not let me go above 2133 even though I set it for 2400. I would save and restart and then go back into the bios and it was back to 2133. I have flashed the bios a few times already. It seems like they have a new one every two weeks. The board features are next to none but they haven't got their full act together yet.
What board features could you possibly want? Fan control, overclocking, and so on are all fine. Furthermore, Intel doesn't care at all about RAM speeds past 1600MHz; you are wasting your money and time trying to overclock the RAM, as well as reducing it's lifespan. Asus also has
higher RMA rates (and not just within the margin of error, and motherboards are not nearly as fragile as HDDs).
Corsair SSD drives are yesterday's news. The Neutrons are the slowest of the lot. For me now it's Samsung 840 Pro's
Also untrue. The Corsair Neutron and 840 Pro are so much faster than HDDs that any difference between the two is unperceivable.
For Ram it's G.Skill or nothing. Many people tell me about Corsair Dominator Platinum. For dollar value G.Skill has the exact same timings for 1/2 the price. Corsair sucks in some departments. The ram is way too expensive just for having the name. Their SSD's need a makeover.
You even comparing these at all tells me that you have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to RAM. Why are you even considering any of those products at all when 1600MHz is all you need to begin with? Also, if you look at
return rates, the two very close; if you are going to criticize RAM, you need to criticize both G.Skill and Corsair for being so much worse than Patriot and Crucial.
PowerColor is the lowest name in Graphics cards. Asus or Sapphire make much better products.
Except that they cost more for the same performance.
Bought an H80i cooler. Quieter and less interference with the airflow over other components.
Which does not even merit consideration over the stock C2D cooler for quietness, while also costing $90 more. Plus, no aftermarket cooler is even necessary without an overclock.
Not impressed with the case. I bought a Bitfenix case and put in beefier quiet running fans. Very stylish and has kid proofing lock up for the flash drive / eSata connectors so his kid can't run into a flash drive and break it off. It also locks away the on/off buttons so they can't shut down or reset the system accidentally while he's doing a large render. Nothing sticks out of the case and even the DVD drive locks away so they can't play with it as well.
Well, aside from you having to grab extra fans, look at
this review, in which the R4 outperforms the Bitfenix XL in every metric. Besides which, there is a door on the R4 which locks, you can manually unplug or disable the on/off switch, and honestly, you can't criticize a case you haven't owned when every review says otherwise.
If I put your components in his system it would slow it down a lot.
I think we can all see why this is untrue. Not to mention that a system with 2 7970s and an H80i would be far more.