General building tips for all DPers:
ALL OF THIS CHANGES. Prices fluctuate, new things come out. In six months, there might be better GPU/CPU options. For example, Nvidia is expected to release an 8GB version of the GTX 980 and 970 in the near future which might be worth considering. Doesn't do a whole lot right now, virtually no games even cap out the current 4GB model, but the new console generation has 8GB VRAM so we might start to see developers utilize that a bit more. Eventually. Maybe. It's hard to say, because both new consoles also massively ****ed up in choice of a CPU.
CPU: AMD or Intel?
Intel. Hands down. This isn't me being an Intel fanboy. AMD used to have some good options for budget builds, good bang for the buck, the first several PCs I build were AMD CPUs. This is no longer the case. Price
erformance, Intel wins at every level until you get all the way down to the extreme low end of processors, and if you're trying to spend that little on a new PC, you're honestly better off going to Best Buy and getting a cheap Dell or something. At the higher end, it's not even close. In single-thread performance, which is key for gamers, Intel blows AMD out of the park.
For gamers, the i5 is a far better choice than the i7. The i7 costs more and it's major feature is hyperthreading
which does absolutely nothing for a gamer. i5's even overclock better.
GPU:
It's hard to beat Nvidia's GTX 970 right now. It's an absolute beast at $330 MSRP. At 1080p, it will run absolutely any game out there at max settings. Even Watch_Dogs, that unoptimized piece of garbage spewed out by Ubisoft. It also overclocks beautifully. I don't know what sort of voodoo magic Nvidia has come up with on power consumption, it only draws 150 watts, so it runs cool and quiet. For many, $330 is a lot for a graphics card, there are definitely other options out there. AMD dropped the prices on a bunch of their cards in response to the release of the 970. Wise decision, it was outperforming GPUs that cost twice as much. Check the wattage if you're considering a cheaper GPU: the 970 actually uses less power than a lot of the lower-performing cards.
Especially AMD/Radeon. The 290, which is about ~60-70 bucks cheaper, uses another
hundred watts of power. Eventually you could literally eat up the difference in electric bills! The Radeon 290X is closer in performance to the GTX 970, but still loses out. And uses over 300 watts to Nvidia's 150. And costs more.
You see why I'm recommending this card.
For the budget conscious, I recommend a GTX 760 or an R9-280. They can still handle Ultra settings on many games, High on ones they can't. They are absolutely sufficient for 1080p gaming and will save over a hundred bucks.
Motherboards:
Not a whole lot to say here. Go with a decent manufacturer and see that it has what you want on the board. (number of GPU slots, in case you want to do two-or-more graphics cards, number of USB slots, SATA slots for HDD/SSDs, etc) Avoid
any motherboard with a "Killer" brand NIC. (ethernet slot) These have crappy drivers or something and they crash computers.
I prefer ATX or mini-ATX, make sure the case you get is compatible.
ASRock, MSI, Asus are my favored manufacturers.
Memory:
Honestly, RAM makes little difference for a gamer. Get at least 8GB, should handle most anything. DDR3-1600 is plenty. Faster RAM does basically nothing for gamers, so don't go with faster RAM unless there's a good sale or something. (seriously, you will
maybe see 1FPS increase for more expensive, faster RAM)
SSD:
Huge quality of life improvement for any machine. Samsung's 840 EVO series or Intel's 530 series are great. Awesome performance, reliable. Pricier than some of the others, but seriously
don't buy OCZ or Crucial. OCZ makes
ultra performance Xxxtreeeeme blingy ****. And it's ****. They make cheap hardware run way harder than it should, resulting in high failure rates. Crucial straight-up lied about a data protection feature on their drives: it doesn't exist on the consumer models. If you get the 840 EVO, make sure you get the latest firmware update. There's a performance loss-over-time issue that those drives ended up having. Easy, quick fix with a software package on their website.
As I wrote in a previous post: A SSD IS THE SINGLE BEST UPGRADE ANYONE CAN MAKE TO A COMPUTER IF THEY DONT ALREADY HAVE ONE.
edit: Note that all of these suggestions are aimed at gamers. People who do professional graphics/video/photo work might absolutely benefit from an i7
