[Mongoose]

Okay, so.  I'm starting to get a better idea of exactly what I'm looking for, at least enough to ask some more specific questions.  Before I get to that though, I wanted to list the recommendations of someone at another site of mine where I cross-posted this.  I know this guy has been building gaming systems for a very long time, so I figured I'd throw his ideas into the mix too, if anyone sees something to comment on:

Mobo: Asus brand, Z97 chipset
CPU: Intel i7-4790K
Cooler: CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo
GPU: GTX980 (Ti optional)
SSD: Samsung 850 Evo 1TB
HDD: Seagate or Western Digital, he's had equal success/failure with each
PSU: 80+ Gold/Platinum rated, probably in the 450-550W range
Case: Corsair Carbide 300R

I haven't priced out any of that out yet myself, but I do see quite a bit of overlap with other people's preferences.

So then, on to a few specific questions.  I'm kind of using TechnoD11's suggested builds as a starting point.

--As far as CPUs go, is there really any practical reason why I should choose an i7 over an i5?  I think I wound up putting an i7 on the Lenovo laptop I helped a friend of mine pick out a few months ago, even though I know it was probably super-overkill for their needs, but I wouldn't mind doing the same for this if there's going to be a definite visible improvement with the higher line.

--I didn't realize that DDR4 was so bleeding-edge, so again, am I going to be seeing any sort of noticeable performance difference from DDR3 outside of the potential to overclock?  If not, I'd be fine sticking with the DDR3.

--I do want to go with more than 1TB of HDD space on-board; I have an older 1.5 TB Seagate external, but I already had to RMA that, so I don't exactly trust it to go the distance.  I'd like to be in a place where I can throw whatever the hell I want on there and just about never have to worry about space.  From what I can gather, the WD Black line that Techno recommended is a more premium WD option, so would I be okay stepping back from that a bit?

--Just looking at the nVidia options, is there anything about the Ti option for the GTX980 that justifies that price jump, or am I probably better off sticking with the basic 980?  And if I do go the AMD route, is the 390X essentially on the same performance level as the 980?

--As Fury noted, I definitely don't want to cheap out on displays, which is why I'm a bit wary of the price of that Acer H6 Series that Techno recommended.  Is it just an example of a really good bang for the buck, or do I want to look at something a bit higher-end?

I'm sure I'll have more specifics as this goes along.  Thanks again for all the help!

[MP-Ryan]

Tom's Hardware's mid-range system is generally where I'd recommend you be, and they waffle between the upper-end i5s and mid-range i7s, depending on price. The i7 performance does not always eclipse the i5 by that much, so you're better to look at a price range you're comfortable with, then check the benchmarks for all the CPUs in that range. An i5 will likely give you a better price with similar performance, but it does depend on the week. If you look at the mid-range guide for Tom's Q1, they have a detailed rationale for the i7 vs i5 in that build, which mostly boils down to pricing.  YOU DO NOT NEED THE 'K' variant processor. That signifies unlocked for over clicking, which you've said you're not interested in. There's no other reason to bother.

Along that note, Intel's stock coolers are generally sufficient for non-overclocked CPUs. If you don't mind the extra expense you can grab an aftermarket cooler, but it's not strictly necessary.

DDR4 is pretty new and pretty pricey. You'll get better bang for your buck off a low-latency higher-clock DDR3.

You can step back on the HDD if you prefer, depending on price. Speed is not essential for the secondary HDD since you'll be running your OS and programs off the SSD.

It's personal preference, but I've long been loyal to Samsung displays; it depends on the model, but the Acer's tend to be more cheaply built.

Someone else can chime in on GPUs, I'm not up on the latest with them.

[Fury]

If your concern is gaming, the only benefit of i7 over i5 is hyper-threading and games still aren't threaded to a point they use more than four threads effectively. Meaning i7 yields very little performance improvement in games over i5.

You're not going to need a 3d party cooler unless you specifically buy a CPU that doesn't come with one, or you plan to overclock. Retail CPUs should always have a stock cooler with them. If overclocking is not your thing, you can save some bucks by not picking a K-model.

There simply isn't large enough performance advantage (none actually) in current generation DDR4 to worry about it. In the future there actually might have a noticeable performance advantage over DDR3, but that's most likely still years away. And by that time, who knows, maybe the latest systems do not even use DIMM anymore.

If you go with a 1TB SSD, you're going to fit all applications and games on it. Just get whatever cheap HDD, performance of the HDD is not relevant.

Again with the GTX 280? In my opinion you'd be better off with GTX 970, it offers better bang for the buck than 980 or 980Ti. By the time GTX 970 is outdated, so is 980 and 980Ti. AMD's 300 series are just rebranded older cards, the only AMD card that is of interest is the upcoming Radeon Nano. But we still don't know its performance or price. You're better off with NVIDIA for now.

Your PSU is not quite up to the task, especially when you're considering very high end cards like 980Ti coupled with i7. GTX 980Ti has recommendation of 600W, 980 and 970 have 500W. AMD Fury X has 650W. I would recommend minimum 700W so you won't have to worry about your PSU now or in the future. 80+ gold/platinum is very good advice though. If there is a chance you might want to use SLI or CrossFire in the future, then you're going to need even more than 700W. 2x GTX 980Ti will need 850W and 2x Fury X will need 1000W.

The Corsair case appears to be otherwise okay, but has poor acoustics. So if you would prefer your case to be really quiet, you might want to look elsewhere.

When determining whether you're making a right choice picking hardware, your best bet is always to read reviews, many of them. That goes for displays too.

[Gee1337]

How long do you want this build to last?

HDD wise, IIRC... Seagate own Western Digital, though I could easily be mistaken on this. But Seagate's are usually quite solid drives. In my experience, I've had good and bad from a lot of companies, although I believe one of the better drives I had was actually a Samsung.

CPU wise, I would say drop to the i5, for reasons already mentioned.

As Fury mentioned, you need more power from the PSU. I would say to get atleast a 750 watt. Okay, 50 watts more than what Fury suggested, but as an audiophile I do like the headroom (okay... a bit irrelevant being an audiophile but... meh).

Finally, as Fury suggested... get a different case. But my reasoning behind this is because of the size. I think you will need something bigger, as a 10.5 inch card will dominate a lot of space! Where as that case might be large enough for the GPU, I know from my current build that it gets fiddly when connecting things like the SATA drives and the front panel connectors. There will not be a lot of room for manouvering fingers.

[LHN91]

Regarding Hard Drives - right now there are really only 3 manufacturers - Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. Fujitsu still makes drives but I've almost never seem a modern one.

Western Digital purchased Hitachi in 2012, but still sells Hitachi (HGST) branded drives. Seagate acquired Samsung's hard drive division the year before.

At the moment, based on BackBlaze's documentation of consumer drives, Hitachi branded drives are the most reliable, followed by Western Digital. Seagate (especially their 1.5, 2, and 3 TB drives) had by far the highest failure rates.

[deathspeed]

Dammit, Fury, you said everything I was planning out while I was at work today! 

[CP5670]

Lots of good advice by others here. As a general rule, I would go big on the video card, monitor and speakers/headphones, and cheap out on the other stuff if you need to. I find that 120hz or 144hz makes a big difference in games and is well worth it, especially games with smooth turning motions like FS. It's fairly easy to sustain 120fps at 1920x1080 but harder at 2560x1440. Gsync/freesync is a great concept but is only supported by a few displays and has a vendor lock problem right now. 4K has no high refresh rate options (and won't for a long time) and requires SLI or CF, which have their own hassles, to get consistently good performance. A sound card still has its advantages, but you're better off getting some high end speakers or headphones first.

CPUs have had very incremental improvements for many years now, although you might as well wait another month or two for Skylake at this point. Some of the K processors are actually different from and faster than the non-K ones, like the 4790K. There are lots of very similar motherboards these days that only differ in obscure features that most people won't use, so don't spend too much there. If you're near a Microcenter in the US, they have huge discounts on CPUs and motherboards towards the end of the year, better than anything online.

A 970 or 290X is good enough for 1920x1080, with the 980 and 390X currently too expensive in comparison. A custom 980 Ti is the best high end option for about $680, but is only worth it at 2560x1440 or 4K. Note that the cards with custom coolers are often considerably faster and quieter than the reference versions. In general, most games today are console ports or indie titles that don't justify high end video cards, and people are buying them for higher resolutions and potentially VR rather than advances in game graphics.

A good case and power supply are worth investing in because they will last many years, but 650W or so is more than enough for any single card system, especially with the focus on power efficiency in modern platforms. The important thing is to get one from a reputable manufacturer.

[Mongoose]

Thanks again for the continued help.  It may seem weird, but I've been almost avoiding really digging into the details over the past few days, and when I started to do so I had some serious anxiety going on.  I don't know, maybe it's what new parents go through when the reality of having their first child sets in.

So I took a look around, and went through everyone's recommendations, then I looked into PCPartPicker, which is an incredibly handy site.  Using that, I put together a preliminary setup for what I'm looking at.  A couple of notes:

--I do want to go with the i7, but I stuck with the normal variant instead of the K as recommended.  If I'm figuring things out right, I think the 4790 is the highest tier in the LGA 1150 category.  Since you guys said that DDR4 really would be a waste, I figured that'd be where I'd want to stop.

--I put in the GTX980 for the hell of it, but I could definitely be talked down to the 970 and use that money elsewhere.

--I went with the larger 500GB SSD, so I don't need to worry about running out of space for frequently-used programs (or hell, maybe a secondary OS even).  That coupled with the bigass 3TB HDD seems like it'll do the job for me.  I went with the Red option from WD, though I'm not sure how the Blue line compares to it; I wasn't able to find the latter represented on the site, so I assume I'm doing something wrong.

--I'm definitely not married to any of the actual vendors/brands in here; I mainly chose them based on the closest matches to the recommendations in here.  I picked the motherboard out of Techno's $1500 build, though I'd definitely be willing to go with another as I poke around a bit more and/or anyone has specific alternates.

--I didn't really spend much time at all looking through cases; this is just what my friend from the other site recommended.  Techno's recommendation doesn't have any external optical bays, which I'd consider a necessity.

--Finally, this obviously doesn't include the display, since I can sit on that for a bit.  Since I did want to keep the whole thing under $2000, I think that leaves plenty of room for something nice there, and perhaps even a discrete sound card if I decide to do that.

So...thoughts?  Opinions?  Barely-concealed derision?

[rev_posix]

--I went with the larger 500GB SSD, so I don't need to worry about running out of space for frequently-used programs (or hell, maybe a secondary OS even).  That coupled with the bigass 3TB HDD seems like it'll do the job for me.  I went with the Red option from WD, though I'm not sure how the Blue line compares to it; I wasn't able to find the latter represented on the site, so I assume I'm doing something wrong.

The blue is the drive aimed at 'mainstream' systems.  I have one in one of my desktop machines and have no complaints with it.  The only 'problem' with them is they aren't available in sizes greater than 1TB.

The red is aimed at entry level NAS machines where the disks run 24/7.  They are also slower than a blue, RPM-wise, have about a 10-20 USD premium over the blue, and benchmarks have shown them to be slightly slower overall than a blue, but are available in larger sizes than a blue.  Some people have said they are basically a WD green with firmware designed for NAS use.

Warranty is the same between the two when dealing with retail packaging ( http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp?wdc_lang=en ), but IIRC, reds have a 24/7 support line and the option for cross shipping in the case of a failure.

[Klaustrophobia]

I personally would go with a Black series HDD, their highest-quality line.  Certainly faster, though I don't know if they are supposedly any more reliable.  Since yours is a data drive, I guess it wouldn't matter a whole lot and it is a substantial savings.

970.  For the love of god yes.  There's like a 5-10% at best performance difference between the two.  Save the $180.

The K variant of the CPU is faster without overclocking.  I didn't think the price difference would be as big as it is now (it was like $10 different back when I got my 2700K), so really it's up to you.  Personally I would go K (using the money saved with the 970) to get the extra headroom and ability to overclock in the future if you end up wanting to.  It's STUPID easy these days.  My motherboard does it all for me automatically.  I just select the boost I want and then benchmark/torture test it after to make sure it's stable.

Windows - why Pro?  If there's not something about it that you know you need, you can save some money with Home Premium.

Memory - The one you have is very good.  However, depending on how you catch the sales, you might be able to find 2400 for the same price.  Just do a quick check when you're ready to place the order.  It's not worth searching hard for.  I think I mentioned before that I saw no real difference from 12 GB of 1600 to 16 GB of 2133 (the highest supported by my board, the RAM is 2400).

[Mongoose]

The blue is the drive aimed at 'mainstream' systems.  I have one in one of my desktop machines and have no complaints with it.  The only 'problem' with them is they aren't available in sizes greater than 1TB.

Huh, that's strange; you'd think there'd be a market for drives larger than that even amongst "mainstream" users.  Would I be okay going with the Green line, then?  Or I could hop over to Seagate if need be: the external I bought from them a few years ago quickly crapped out and needed an RMA, but the 320GB internal on this system has been behaving itself for several years.

970.  For the love of god yes.  There's like a 5-10% at best performance difference between the two.  Save the $180.

Heh, fair enough.  I guess my e-peen can survive at its current length.

Windows - why Pro?  If there's not something about it that you know you need, you can save some money with Home Premium.

I'm not sure how practical it'll be as a whole, but I did want to take advantage of XP Mode in Professional.  It'd be a hell of a lot more convenient than absolutely needing to keep this current system set up forever.

And you're right, I might as well take advantage of the increased clock speed on the K variant even if I'm not overclocking.  I'll keep an eye out for a good deal on that RAM too.

[Klaustrophobia]

As of yet I have not encountered anything that won't work on Home Premium.  I haven't even had to XP compatibility mode (which does exist in home premium, and to be honest I'm not sure what the difference is to XP mode).

[CP5670]

The 4790K is good for the higher speed but does not actually overclock well, since it's close to its max speed already. It turbos to 4.4 on two cores and 4.2 on all of them, and will practically always do 4.4 on all cores (which most boards have a setting for). You might get up to 4.7 on air cooling with extra voltage, which is barely noticeable and not worth it.

The 980 is good if you can find one for $450 or so. Otherwise, you might as well spend $200 more for a 980 Ti, which is much faster. Try to get one with a custom cooler. I like my 980 but got it when it came out.

For Windows, if you're talking about 8.1 Pro, it includes Hyper-V and not XP Mode, but both are rather useless for games. I've found that VMWare (free) is a better option for an XP gaming VM, but the best thing is to keep a native XP install around, which is still possible on modern hardware with a little effort. There are quite a few broken DirectDraw games in 8.1.

[rev_posix]

The blue is the drive aimed at 'mainstream' systems.  I have one in one of my desktop machines and have no complaints with it.  The only 'problem' with them is they aren't available in sizes greater than 1TB.

Huh, that's strange; you'd think there'd be a market for drives larger than that even amongst "mainstream" users.  Would I be okay going with the Green line, then?  Or I could hop over to Seagate if need be: the external I bought from them a few years ago quickly crapped out and needed an RMA, but the 320GB internal on this system has been behaving itself for several years.

Personally, I avoid the green drives.  They are slower than the blues and are aimed at noise and so-called 'power saving' over performance.

In a way, it makes sense.  Most people, AKA 'mainstream', aren't going to fill up a TB of space anytime soon, and typically anyone who wants a larger drive tends to go for the 'performance' drives.

Hitachi and Fujitsu also offer drives in > 1TB sizes that aren't that bad in performance and reliability.  Seagate, I'm a bit leery about as they had a real problem with their early > 1TB drives for a while.  I think they have since fixed their problems, but I've not researched their reliability rates in a while.

This is the problem with the amount of merges and buyouts in the past few years, us end users don't have nearly as many options as we used to. 

[Meneldil]

My experience with WD Greens is very bad; had two of them (0.5 and 2 TB) and they both started dying the exact same slow and excruciating death after the warranty expired (basically bad sectors started showing up and my OS would freeze intermittently more and more as the time went by). However when the time came to buy a new disk, I saw that people's experiences with anything else in my price range were just as terrible, so I went with a 2 TB WD Red because the extended warranty was the only thing that guaranteed something that really seemed worthwhile.

[Mongoose]

Heh, we've reached the stage where the experts are giving directly-conflicting advice.

About the video card: whether it's the 970 or 980 (still waffling a tiny bit), is that Zotac brand a good one to go with?  Or should I look for an Asus or MSI option instead?  (I swear that's the hardest part for me in all of this; years ago I used to think that nVidia and AMD just directly released all the cards themselves, which would make life one  hell of a lot easier.)

The same question goes for motherboards.  I've seen both MSI and Asus recommended, and like I said I put that Krait Edition in there (funky coloring on that one) mainly because it was on Techno's recommended build list.  Once you get the correct chipset/socket plugged it, it's still this insane range of options.  And then there's the case, which I know is all on me...this doesn't get any easier.

As for the HDD, it looks like a 2TB Black series is still $10 more expensive than the 3TB Red series.  In addition, a lot of the Newegg comments mention the Black drives being noticeably loud, and taking a longer time to spin up from a dead stop (presumably because of the higher speed), which is what it'd be doing as a primarily media drive.  The corresponding Seagate Barracuda models are substantially cheaper, but the comments mention a noticeably high failure rate.  I can check out Hitachi and Fujitsu as well, but beyond that I'm not really sure what my best option is, other than just sticking with the Red.

And then I still have to pick out a monitor (and a BD burner too I guess).  Dammit.

[MP-Ryan]

Motherboard branding:  Asus makes quality boards. I have heard good things about MSI. I tried Gigabyte last time and I will never buy another Gigabyte board again. Terrible configuration explanation, documentation, and sketchy driver support.

The benchmarks on the K variant CPUs depend on the base processor. Some are genuinely faster. The majority you won't notice much difference.

HDDs: If you are running an SSD for software/OS, you aren't going to notice much of a difference between the HDD speeds. Personally, while the higher speeds offered by the Black may be nice occasionally, I don't believe they justify some of the whopping price differences. HDD speed will affect things that read/write to the HDD; if your game saves are set to the (very large) SSD you picked, the HDD is moot for gaming performance.

It is worth noting - if the Seagate drives are substantially cheaper, two cheap drives configured in RAID for mirroring are a much better investment than one more expensive drive not configured as such. HDD failure is a fact of life. RAID eliminates the pain.

It all depends how premium you're willing to go and how much extra you're willing to pay for very small performance gains.

[Mongoose]

Hmm, RAID is definitely an idea.  The 2TB Barracuda is going for only $75 now.  But the more I look at these reviews, the more I feel like I should steer clear.  Lots of failures within a year or two.  We've only been using this same exact storage technology for like 25 years...you'd think there'd be a good reliable option out there by now.

[CP5670]

Zotac is good and has some nice custom coolers. Any of the Z97 motherboards around $100-130 should be good. There is little difference between the cheap and expensive motherboards except for features you will probably never use.

I don't think RAID 0 or 1 is worth it, as it doesn't prevent the need for backups and is much slower than a SSD, as well as being harder to migrate between motherboards. It's only good for servers to avoid downtime if a drive fails. Hard drives can last through many upgrades. I still use a 10 year old WD 250GB drive that has XP and many of my older games on it, including FS2.

[deathspeed]

...But the more I look at these reviews, the more I feel like I should steer clear.  Lots of failures within a year or two.  We've only been using this same exact storage technology for like 25 years...you'd think there'd be a good reliable option out there by now.

I have wondered about this as well.  I have an original 74GB 10,000 RPM WD Raptor that I have been using daily since my first build in 2005, a couple of WD Blue 6400AAKS drives in daily-use systems since 2008, and a 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 in a relative's PC since 2009, with no trouble at all with any of them.  But when shopping for new drives, it seems I see a lot more bad reviews, with drives DOA or dying within a year or two.  Maybe quality took a back seat to capacity in the last few years.