New machine...
 

After several years - and I am talking about at least 6 yrs - I've finally managed to do it. Click that "Purchase" button. Now I may regret my choice of case, had I gone for a larger budget, I would have too - I would have gone for a Fractal Design R4 or maybe even R5. But oh well.

This is it:
* Intel i5-4590 (Haswell Refresh)
* Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3
* Cooler Master Midi Tower Silencio 452
* Corsair 2x8GB, DDR3, PC12800, CL10, Vengeance, LP
* Gigabyte GeForce GTX970 WF OC 4GB
* Seasonic Voeding M12II EVO 750W
* Toshiba Harddisk 3.5" 3TB, SATA600, 7200rpm

I didn't get an SSD, because I wanted to invest more into the GFX section. I also won't ask "will it run WoW ok?", because it will. My Macbook does ok, albeit on the lowest settings.

Looks good, but i suggest you to get an SSD as soon as you can, it can save minues in your life every day.
I would have also went for a bit stronger CPU but not like this is a bad choice.

I would have, but I was on a fairly tight budget - and the next "step" up added a lot more to the price tag sadly.

Still that new haswell i5 is probably as good as my old i7-4770k in overall performance.

Moonie got a new computer! :D

I am unsure about this, but i read on many sites that, if you do not plan to overclock your cpu you do not really need an z97 board but could go with an h97 instead.

Z97 should be better for future next-gen but same socket cpus

It's entirely up to the features of each component and what you'd want to get out of it in the long run.
If you don't need to overclock right now, maybe down the road you might do it anyways to get a little extra bit out of your hardware, and the price difference isn't too big to make it worth it.

I really want to try out VT-d compatible hardware later on, sadly it was not really supported in the architecture of the parts I chose way back when. VT-d (or AMD-V) allows you to pass-through PCI-E (in addition to CPU, USB etc) to virtual machines, one possibility is Windows in a VM on Linux and be able to play games at close to 100% performance, which is really cool. See this video for a demonstration.

I see literally no point in buying anything other than the base i5 quad core because overclocking no longer voids the warranty.

OP:
I would have rather gotten a fractal design define series case. Significantly better build than the CM cases and half the price of the silencio

Since when does OC voids warranty?

Here Fractal Design was about double the Silencio's price :(

I was between Silencio, Fractal Design R4 (R5 was completely out of budget) or a Corsair N400 :(
Due to the 3 fans on the GFX card, I hope to get quiet with the Silencio. We'll see how it goes, I have the most doubts about the case anyhow :P It's a gamble.

I really wanted http://www.fractal-design.com/home/p...-titanium-grey ;)
Or the https://www.nzxt.com/product/detail/130-H230.html which was out of stock.

I took a Z97 because : Features and it was about 10 more than the H97 ;)

And THAT YouTube is amazingly interesting.

It hasn't for some time now back back in the pre core 2 days the Intel warranty literally said that overclocking voided the warranty.

I would like to add the following comment to my machine (Went with a different case, the NZXT H230)

I had no idea that there's smoke coming out of chimneys in WoW, and my WaterShield looks different with a trail.

And trust me; SSD is on my need-now list, picking a 3TB drive wasn't the best of ideas.
1. Windows 10 had no issues with it, since it uses GPT and has no issue with UEFI instead of BIOS.
2. Windows 7 apparently can't deal with GPT (default USB media, had to juggle around with a lot). After 2 days of long evenings cursing, I finally gave up, converted my drive to MBR and installed 7. I have worse performance now :P

Also : I learned the hard way that some USB speakers cause BSODs when putting your machine to sleep :P

This bug is in every Windows system since the last ~15-20 years.

Hence why I switched to the penguin.

I procrastinate switching. I actually like windows 7 (I do not have USB speakers though). But I am getting some weird BSOD when playing videos at times (I suspect FLASH).

Uninstall terribad Adobe flash or any other flash sh!t, and start using Chrome.

Actually it facintaing how fast Linux handling USB devices without any extra drivers and stuff compared to WinDOSdows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84

I have Chrome installed, but I like Firefox better, it is not as polished as Chrome. Plus, I am still not certain what Google sees from my Chrome browser. I need to research it more.

The real issue is with the Firefox'es flash support, thats the main reason i switched to Chome, all flash releated stuff was laggy as hell. Chome has it's own built in flash (stolen from Linux) and its super smooth.