Yet another 'Building a new computer' thread! Yay!

[MrTomRobs]

Hello forum frequenters!

Situation
I've been wanting to build my own computer for a while to learn more about how they work, as well as play some pretty, pretty bad ass stuff and learn how to do various things, such as programming (again), modelling, graphic manipulation etc.

Being the fairly intelligent sod i am, i've been doing some research, and this is a preliminary run down of what i intend to build. It's open to discussion, and as this will be my first build, i'm looking to get some feedback on my choices and what not

Mission objective
The aim for this comp will be to run BF2:PR, BF3, ARMA 3, FarCry3 and possibly a decent flight simulator on full/nearly full graphics, as well as some good future proofing. I'll also be looking to carry on learning some coding languages such as Python and whatever else is relevant once i've gained a basic mastery of it, as well as learning how to do some modelling so i can start to contribute to the community in whatever is needed, so i'll need performance to be able to cope with that.

Means to achieve objective
Case
Corsair Carbide 300R (?59.98GBP)

PSU
Corsair Builder series CXM 600W Modular 80+ Bronze (?59.45GBP)

Motherboard
Asus P8Z77-V (?128.87GBP)

CPU
Intel i5-3570k (?172.53GBP)

Ram
Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4x4GB Sticks) DDR3 @ 1600MHz (?104.99GBP)

GFX Card
Asus NVidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti (?198.30GBP)

HDD
Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (?65.00GBP)

Optical Drive
Asus DRW-24B5ST 24x DVD (?18.99GBP)

OS
Windows 7 Professional SP1 64bit OEM edition (?49GBP)


Reasons:
I've gone for Windows 7 first and foremost because i'm simply not convinced that the extra money for W8 would be worth the new features. I've not got a touch screen monitor (though that may come at a later stage), and I've been using W7 for the past few years and I'm happy with how it runs.

I'm not using a SSD hard drive YET, simply because this is my first build and I want to get the basics down. I may decide in the future to get my self a 64GB one and use that as a boot drive, and use the Cav. Black as my main hard drive for everything else.

As far as I can tell yet, I can find these components from Amazon at a cost of ?853.11 GBP after offers. If you think you can find anything cheaper elsewhere, let me know.

Overview
Being an ever friendly bugger and wanting to help newbies out and stuff, i'll be doing a video blog walking through what i'm doing when i get all the parts together. Early episode plans look a little like this:

1. Introduction to series and listing of parts, with reasoning behind part selection
2. Putting together the case, power supply and motherboard, walking through what connects to what, how, where and why
3. Inserting the HDD and DVD drives, connecting to power and motherboard
4. Attaching the RAM and graphics cards (and sound card if purchased)
5. First boot and installing the OS (Windows 7 most likely, i have a copy somewhere around here from my degree)
6. Configuring the set up, downloading drivers and installing Arma and expansions
7. From here - The Arma Chronicles (Video diary of my learning curve with Arma and its various mods), The Python Chronicles (video tutorials for learning python and such), The Modellers Chronicles (video diary of me learning modelling skills in a similar vain to the computer build)

Hopefully i'll be able to get a bit of a following online in helping newbies gain a bit of confidence with computers, helping to build their own and learn various skills from a similar view point that they are likely to be in.

So there we are! Bit long winded, and first and foremost a discussion is needed on what you guys think of this build, how realistic is it and what improvements i can make, and then hopefully i can start thinking about doing this blog with the ever loving tender care and support from the reality mod community :P