Sometimes poor performance can be caused by an unstable overclock. Do some more stress testing to ensure your system is ACTUALLY stable, and try running these applications at stock speed to see if the issue goes away.

Not that I can think of.

That's bizarre. Yeah your preview window should be working fine with specs like that. A re-install might be in order? Maybe update all your drivers? Sorry it's tough to diagnose something like this without sitting in front of it.

It sounds like you should probably lean on the IT folks at your school for advice on this. I could pitch in my $0.02, but it's likely that the school has guidelines for how it should be done anyway.

Noctua has some GREAT low profile stuff, and Cooler Master is king when it comes to budget tower coolers, so look into those depending on your price range :)

Thanks for the kind words :)

If you're okay without overclocking a dual core i3 with hyperthreading will help significantly in games that require more than two processing threads, but for a real step up in performance an i5 is the next step up. There's a bit of a gap between the 3258 and everything else in Intel's line up :(

1. Go for gold. What's the worst that can happen?? No, but seriously. Just go slow and be patient and you'll be fine.

Thanks so much. It's nice to have positive feedback like this :)

That looks like a really awesome little LAN rig!

I usually recommend selling off your existing card and picking up a single more powerful GPU. I think that's a good bet for you right now.

Hmmm, well there are a lot of rumours circulating about a new graphics card that will allegedly launch pretty soon and allegedly have more display port connectors. Maybe see what comes of that?

Interesting build. For a video editing/ gaming rig I'm not entirely sure that ECC/Xeon is necessary. I don't know too much about your workload though.

I wouldn't suggest going with two 128GB SSDs in RAID 0. Just get a single 256 and then if you really want RAID0 get yourself another 256 down the line. It doesn't make…

Interesting build. I'm gonna say something crazy and suggest X79 :o

The Rampage IV Gene is a proven board, DDR3 is cheaper than DDR4 with no performance penalty (and you can cram 32GB of it into that board), and a 6 core IVY-E is going to perform really really well for a long time yet.

DON'T overspend on the graphics…

It's okay. I'd probably go for a Core i5 personally, but AMD motherboards are more affordable.

Two 980s would be about as good as it gets, so any games that DON'T run properly at that res on that system will need to wait for better hardware to exist. I second the previous commenter's suggestion to get two 970s versus two 980s though. Better to do more frequent upgrades than to buy top of the line stuff a lot of…

Watch some of our build guides and I guarantee you'll be fine :)

I would definitely add an SSD.

Here's a handy dandy video :)

Wow. that's quite the backup plan. It's a good thing you don't build rocket ships.