first time build helpFollow

An OS license?

More generally, I would have to wonder if you're charging this to someone other than yourself (or if you simply have a lot of money). A bit of what you've specc'ed treads well past bang for your buck territory.

- The i7 960 is nearly twice the price of, and not nearly twice as fast as a stock-clocked i7 930 (which should overclock well past a stock 960 to boot).

- 12GB of RAM is excessive for gaming right now. 6GB is too, for that matter, but it's the best tradeoff for triple channel. Not like RAM can't be added later.

- A 5970 is very nice, sure, still the best single card (though not single GPU). Again, if you have the money to burn...sure...but if not, there are very viable cards for less than half the cost. Value there may depend on the support/performance of multi-GPU setups for FFXIV at release, as right now a couple GTX 460s is rather potent for the cost (when supported, of course), and would be a few hundred less.

- I would maybe consider a slightly smaller SSD (it should just be OS/apps anyway) at more around the $300 range. It's already costly per GB.

- Do you actually have immediate plans to be burning Blu-ray? Chances are the burners (and media) will only be going down in price and up in quality.

If you order a "retail" version of the CPU, then it'll come with a stock heat sink/fan that'll be sufficient for running at stock speed in a standard size case.

'course, there are always plenty of good 3rd party coolers as well, though offhand I don't know of a standout one for the i7. Partly depends on your goals, IE, overclocking, noise level, or whatever.