What I'm trying to say is, if you're gonna overclock, you're better off saving those $100 and putting it towards a better motherboard like the ASRock Z77 Extreme4 and a better power supply, like a Corsair TX750 V2 or a Seasonic X650 if you need something highly efficient and fully modular. There are choices...
I just don't think it's right to make a $1000 system that leaves you with little options to upgrade down the road. What if someone wants six months from now to buy another HD 7950, for example? They'd need another motherboard and a new power supply.
What if, what if, what if? Obviously you can construct a "what if" that makes every build look like a bad choice. If I followed every "what if" upgrade scenario to its logical conclusion, I would end up with a $2000 build that didn't offer any greater out-of-the-box performance than the $1000 one I've posted. That build would of course fall victim to "what if I didn't upgrade this machine at all?"
I've said repeatedly that you don't have to get a GTX 670 if you don't want, the 7950 build is a perfectly viable option and a great value at $900. I've featured $1000 in the main list because that's a very common budget.
To your upgrade-ability point, a $900 build with a Z77 Pro3, 7950, and 550W PSU (or a $1000 one with GTX 670) can overclock and upgrade just fine. You're going to have a viable GPU upgrade 18-30 months down the line, which is a more common upgrade schedule IMHO. You can also add more RAM and storage as necessary. The only thing that isn't really upgradeable is the CPU, but an Extreme4 (or any 1155 mobo) is going to leave you in the same boat.
To your specific multi-GPU point, the vast majority of people
don't "upgrade to SLI/CFX". Multi-GPU adoption rates hang out at around 2% for Steam users, who are by definition gamers. Who knows how many of those bought multi-GPU right off the bat and how many upgraded to it, but the upgraders are certainly a sub-2%
niche.
Plenty of people
do get really excited about the possibility of multi-GPU when they're building a PC. Experience tells me that most are satisfied with the performance of a single-high end card once they actually get a machine up and running. I'm posting builds that draw upon my experience to help people avoid common mistakes, not to throw in as many
niche features as possible to meet a certain price point.
If somebody spent $1000 on a multi-GPU capable mobo and 750W power supply and subsequently never used them, they would have essentially wasted that extra $100. Based on the statistics above, that's a pretty likely scenario and that $100 could have gone towards a single GPU upgrade down the line.
I guess my super ultimate final point is that this build is meant to be a guide for the most common scenarios and budgets. It's certainly not going to replace build threads where we get insight into what an individual's specific needs are.
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