I'm struggling to figure out what you are trying to do. We know you are a smart guy. Well maybe not since you are thinking of getting a EVGA 780 Hydro Copper with water cooling these days.
(sorry couldn't resist).
But on a serious note, what type of machine setup do you have at present?
What are you planning to do with your current machine?
What are you planning on doing with the new "beast"?
Carlo
Lmao watercooling is to keep my system silent, and i do mean silent.
The area where i live is basically the country on a quiet lane. You can hear gpu fans and cpu fans easily in the room so watercooling keeps it nice a quick with 600rpm super quiet fans that hardly spin
Right now my rig is the following:
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230V2 4 core 8 thread 3.6GHz
Motherboard: Asrock fatal1ty z77 Professional (yes i do use the dual lan)
Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro **Running out quickly so needs to be 32GB**
Storage: 2 x 120GB SSD + 2 4TB WD Red's
GPUs: GTX 780 Hydro Copper + 3 MSI 750TI's
Monitor: 50" Plasma TV
So right now my system runs the following tasks:
Home Theatre
Gaming Rig
Web Server
Virtual Machines
Media Server
Video Editor
Image Editor
Coding system
As you can tell it does a lot of stuff.
The new one needs to do exactly the same but i need more power behind it. My VM's can get very power hungry running wallets or smaller servers for different tasks.
I use a lot of system memory with all the VM's running + games so i need a lot of memory
I code a lot at home so i need more then 1 display to help my work flow, i need at least 2 at all times.
Same goes for video and picture editing
I am replacing my 50" plasma so i need 4 27" screens to replace it for home theatre
The system is on 24/7 for the media server and home theatre so low power is a factor, GPU's wont rev up unless i want the so low power cpu is a must
Gaming, so this is why a second 780. If i am going to spend so much money on a machine i want some good gaming performance. You put 4 1080p screens together and that is a lot of pixels to render. A single 780 would fall over and die if you tried to game on those resolutions with good settings
Watercooling fittings are more to make my life easier. I am adding in quick disconnects to the entire system so i can remove parts if need be
The current machine will be given to my girlfriend along with a 750ti so she can use it instead of her laptop plus so she can game. She isn't so into gaming so doesn't need such a high end gpu. She will also be using 2 of the 4 monitors i buy when suing the system, so we will have 2 each but when she isnt on i will have all 4
Have i missed anything?
Made out alive, though wasted a lot of money in the process. It's just consumer-grade hardware does surprisingly well these days, a simple AMD FX-8350 gives all the power that vast majority of hobbyists need, supports up to 32GB of ECC RAM, and there's enough 990FX boards out there that work great as hypervisors with Xen/Vmware.. There's also a lot of previous gen Xeons on ebay, 6 core / 12 threads 1366 cpus go for like less than $150 and are still very capable. One can build a very powerful server for under $1k and in real-life applications most would never even notice the difference in performance compared to the latest/greatest top xeon. 
, and even if i get last gen (same as i have now) 6 core xeons, with a proper mb, cpu, new memory etc. i am still looking at a good chunk of money.
