By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
arcaneguyver said:
vivster said:
arcaneguyver said:
Good topic; have been looking into piecing a rig together this year, and I figure if you're getting a gaming PC, don't half ass it. Looks like 1.5-2k is roughly what you need.

If it's about money you can get a really good rig for 1k. Everything above includes premium hardware like high quality mainboards, cases and PSUs. Diminishing returns start very early when building a PC. For example people going with $400+ CPUs when it's only 5% more powerful than the $200 one.

Well, I need to finish paying my car off (this summer!!!!) before I can 'safely' drop $300+/- a month on parts for six months. So far looking at...

- Intel i7-470K 4.0GHz processor
- Asus Maximus VI Hero motherboard
- 2x G.Skill Sniper Gaming Series  16GB (2x8GB)
- Samsung 840 EVO 120GB SSD
- Barracuda 2TB HD
- GeForce GTX 970 4GB STRIX video card

...but now that I'm looking at it, it'll probably qualify as just a mid-range PC. I imagine I should go for a better video card & CPU.L

Your CPU is not going to bottleneck gaming platforms for years. I mean, if you want some more performance from it just overclock it (I assume that is why you would buy a k series i7.) The only game that seems to even benefit from 8 threads is Dragon Age Inquisition and that is because it is so disgustingly unoptimized that it maxes four-threaded/core CPU's for no reason. Not only that, but your cores are clocked at 4.0ghz (4.4 ghz with turbo boost) and even more if you overclock it. That is fantastic IPC performance. I personally would only get an i7 if I'm doing a lot of video-processing (or similar CPU intensive activities.) Otherwise, i5's are plenty fine for gaming, and it probably won't be until the end of this generation that games will benefit greatly from more than four threads.  You'd save a lot of money ($100) by just getting an i5-4690k and likely won't see any performance difference (5 fps at most in games that benefit from hyperthreading.) 

The same holds true for the GPU. 

There is no way this computer would be construed as mid-ranged. Mid-ranged would be an i3/AMD CPU + GTX 750 Ti (or r9 270.) This computer will be a high-ranged PC for at least three-four years I'm thinking.