Building my first Tower

[Mullet]

Bottom line buying hardware is always a good thing no matter what you get.

[Armisael]

Also, be sure to throw plenty of RAM in there for your idle account farm. I'm using at least 4.5GB on my accounts right now, and I'm not even idling my main.

[Armisael]

Well, sandy bridge E is out.

And, uh, that's a lot of money. You could almost buy 3 2500K or FX-8150s for the cost of a 3930k (and that's the cheap one)!

So my advice remains basically the same (tempered by Stephen's points).
1. Figure out what sort of stuff you do most often. Will you benefit more from more cores or from faster cores? This depends on what you do with your computer. I imagine that someone on these forums will be able to help you figure that out.
2. Look for deals on bulldozer and sandy bridge.
3. Figure out how to use Grillz's employee discount.

Then you pick the rest of your parts, and that's just a matter of endless searching through the various combo deals and email deal on newegg. Unless you get a really crappy one, a power supply is a power supply.

[madmattd]

Sandy Bridge E was not intended to be generic consumer-level. It's basically the extreme CPUs which are always way overpriced. They are basically replacing the 980x, 990x with these new chips. Think LGA 1366 from 2008/09. Sandy/Ivy are more like LGA 1156 was. But they still aren't worth the price, that's for sure. A 2600K beats out a 980x in 90% of usage scenarios at < 1/3 the price...

Either go Sandy Bridge or wait for Ivy Bridge. Bulldozer could be an option, but they don't stack up all that favorably to even Sandy Bridge so unless you get a great price on one, don't bother.