What's a good rig to go along a R9 290X ?

[Pemalite]

czecherychestnut said:

Wagram said:
no watercooling? hmm, i don't think i would want to put an r9 290x into a pc without water cooling lol.

No, it won't. The R9 290X uses only a few watts more than the GTX 690 and they weren't spontaneously combusting without watercooling, you'll be fine if your case is adequately ventilated (ie at least 2 ~12 cm fans not including your PSU fan). 

I'd second a i7-4770k rather than i5-4670k just for future proofing, with the current consoles games will start to get optimised for 8 cores so it'll benefit you later on.

Console games can't and won't be using 8 cores/threads on the consoles.
Plus an Intel Dual-Core is on par with the 8-core jaguar.
A quad-core 4670K is more than enough for the future, his motherboard will also be able to upgrade from Haswell to Broadwell when it comes available, if the PC is only for gaming, don't waste cash on the CPU that can be spent for an overall larger performance increase by using that money for a better GPU.

Hyper-threading isn't a replacement for real cores anyway, sure you get some performance boost.