When I get the rest of my grant from school I plan on getting a new desktop and giving my current one to my mom. this one can't run most of the newer games anyways certainly not star citizen. I get the money probably late january or mid-february but I plan on spending around $800 ( I can go up but don't want to spend more than $1000). I'd rather stay around $800. Would you recommend building it myself (which I have never done though I do have all the tools and I do know most if not all the stuff in a desktop or buying one already built. I can get windows 7 professional or ultimate for free through the school. might have to buy a keyboard but thats not much. i have been looking and buying parts and building it myself doesn't seem like that much of a price difference then buying one already built. Also which site would you recommend buying from? i've only ever used newegg but i've never had a problem from them. and what about the DIY kits that have most of the stuff. (case, motherboard, power supply, cpu all that. usually only things they don't have are graphics and a cd/dvd drive though that you can get away without since most stuff even OSs are USB or downloads now.)
You have the whole Borf's tekko-no-logical no-ledge as your backup y'hear! Besideswise, them parts only fit one way to one place each. There's the long rectangularular piece and it's matching hole-in-a-socket and so. That saves you 40-100$ depending on shop! And in your budget that's quite a lot. I mean, if you were paying 3k then 50$ for assembly would be just icing but for you I recommend buildin-it man-u-ally. Do you need an optical drive right now? Essentially, don't buy any 40-50$ part that you can add in later. Don't even try to go for 16gb ram immediately, start with 8, either 1x8 or a 2x4gb kit, then get another of exact the same later. As for motherboard, I recommend one of those that has sockets for the CPU and graphics card, Sata-sockets, ram slots and such are a plus. No, I can't give much advice on which mobo is hot right now but there are a couple of real gearheads here that will know the answer right off the bat. Essentially, do you think you'll be getting tiny streams of extra cash in the immediate future that you can use to upgrade your machine? If yes, then we need to make you a 'starter kit' and a real plan on what to upgrade when (not dates but what in which order) and then you can keep upgrading it over time. Otherwise it changes everything and it will need to be optimized a little bit differently. We've got you covered!
$5,700 ish for the grant half now (for this semester around $1,200 was used for tuition and fees and another 100 will be to books so I'll get about $1,500 back) and the other half ($2,600 ish total for summer minus tuition, fees which would be lab fees parking and such and books not sure how that works for summer classes if i have to be half or full time. not sure what full time is in summer). but optical drive isn't need right away and one hard drive (i'd rather go for a 2 terrabyte then a 1 right now and not solid state yet) would suffice for now. keyboard depends on if my current desktop has a ps/2 port or not i need to check that but i'm lazy. by the combos i mean something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.2269719
I'd step the CPU down a notch. There's not room for a 350$ CPU in an 800$ budget. The 4690k would be more than fast enough for anything you'll need in the next couple years, and it's 100$ cheaper. I'm running a 4570k and it smokes everything. MWO runs over 100fps and it's the most CPU intensive game I know of. Edit: that combo also didn't have a video card. I'd get something from Nvidia at around the 225$ price point. That seems to be the sweet spot for performance/price. You'll want to shop around a bit. The best choice can vary from day to day, depending on who's running sales on what.
Without actually looking up prices on things I'd look at an i5-4690K Devil's Canyon with a Z97 mobo of some kind. Should be able to run about anything without being too spendy. I went Skylake just for future-proofing but I also wasn't building a whole system, just upgrading. For hard drives I'd go with a 120gb SSD for the operating system and then a big HDD for storage, you can go 500gb to save some money because you can always add on to that later. The GTX970 has been great for me and many others, I haven't researched much into the new 960 series to know what they are doing. Get a good cooler for the CPU, pre-sealed water cooling can be done without being really expensive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117372 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132118
I put most of the money into the GPU while trying to give you the best money can buy. A intel build will take away a lot of stuff as the CPU and mobo tend to cost more. this is just my personal preference for what you might want to look at buying this list also scraps your top end budget. list for you HAF912 mid case 59.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119233 Gigabyte UD3 mobo 110.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128859 AMD FX 6300 3.5ghz 110.oo http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113286 Corsair RM750 psu 130.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139137 Corsair Veng 2x4 gig 1866 ram 48.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233142 Samsung 850 pro 256 gig SSD 139.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA2W01V61639 Samsung dvd rom 14.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827151279 Artic silver 5 thermal paste 8.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA9VM3N51132 620.00 dollars right now without the GPU now for the optional parts the GPU GTX 970 MSI 350.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127832 XFX Radeon 390X 405.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150727 The 970 is a good card for the money but the 390x will perform much better on higher resolution. if you are only going to be in 1080 I would go with the 970, if you are going to be 1440 or over go with the 390x as that is where it will overtake the 970 in performance. also brands for GPU are somewhat of a personal taste. As some tend to leave a bad taste in peoples mouths more then others. CPU cooler Cooler Master 212 evo 30.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103099 CPU cooler isn't needed but if you want to overclock any this is one of the best air coolers you can get for the money. also don't forget tax and shipping.
one of the great things about north carolina? almost never tax on internet purchases. not from newegg at least. rarely amazon too.
so whats better processor? AMD or intel? a bit unrelated but i find it funny when none of the i5's have hyper threading but the i3's and i7's do.
if i went with an i5 both of these actually seem decent aside from the powersupply in the one (550?) and maybe the RAM (i don't know anything about that brand) http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.2531834 $865 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.2406037 of course both will probably be gone by the time i get my money either out of stock or no longer done as a bundle. this one is most of what hollister posted at $530ish. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.2465543 is the fx-8320 pretty much just an 8 core version of the 6300? and it seems most of the combos with the i5 or amd fx-6300 (or similar) do include a pretty goo graphics card. or at least i think they are good cards. r9s and r7s and gtx 960s and such.
Historically they both have CPU's roughly with equal performance but AMD also historically has their hardware running at higher temps while often offering a bit more performance per buck. Ideally you'll want to be running as cool as possible because once you start building up heat it tends to be bad all around. Though there are people who insist that user has no impact on the natural temperature shifts inside case Hyper threading is said to be mostly useful in tasks like video editing etc. Most games even to date that support threading and multiple processors don't really do it very efficiently. A lot of the time it still feels like running on a single core. Sure, it's better than running on one but the performance gain doesn't scale. Iirc it had to do with nothing really being done simultaneously but instead sequentially with scheduling, just with more cores available for scheduling. And not forgetting that a lot of people steer clear of threading in games or use it in a limited fashion because if you're making the engine yourself it's incredibly difficult to get it right and if you are using an engine made by someone else you can expect threading to be incredibly unstable. I know I tried it for some time and usually my stuff 'just runs' but with it it was awful. TL;DR I used to always go for AMD and Radeon combo because they used to be cheaper but I've been burnt too many times by shitty performance (such as way too much heat etc.) and issues that I now pay a little more / get a little less performance but I know I can trust it - and the temps stay low. But that's a holy war raging between the supporters of each camp.
best part is since i'm going for a geospatial technology degree (associates which actually is what companies want right now is associates because bachelors and above the company has to train where associates are trained in classes where all other it's more theoretical then practical work) is since my work is all on the computer i need a better computer for the GIS software. if anyone ever asks about education grant/loan money (no one ever has).
