New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

Going to help build a new PC for a friend, just looking for ideas;

She has a £1500 budget for a gaming PC, we're thinking Intel and probably NVIDIA, I have an idea of the build I would do, at least a GTX 970 or maybe even a 980 and a Core i7.

Not sure what the best storage solution would be - go for large traditional storage and smaller boot SSD, or larger SSD?

Optical drive I might also give a miss but I dunno if she wants one or not.

Also, figuring ASUS motherboard.

The big question is, should we go Haswell or is it worth going for a Skylake processor and eating into possible GPU budget? I'm a bit torn on this, but since it is primarily a gaming rig, I don't know if Skylake would be worth it?

Re: New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

I don't think you'll get a lot of additional gaming performance out of a Skylake CPU. The only nice thing about it is some degree of future proofing as the chipset and RAM will be useful for some time.
I upgraded to Skylake not long ago because my old motherboard got broken and it was difficult to find a replacement. A decent Skylake CPU isn't even that expensive. RAM is pretty cheap as well these days.

The important part if the graphics card. The 970 is a good solution, even though it will be obsolete in a few months. If your friend needs to the PC right now it might even be a good idea to use onboard graphics/cheap used last gen card for the time being and buy a Pascal some time later this year.

As for storage - HDDs are very cheap, so I'd always throw a 1-2TB drive in there, if only for redundancy. SSD size depends on remaining budget.
You don't often need optical drives anymore. They aren't very expensive though. Usefull if you have a collection of music CDs and like listening to music on PC or to archive your collection.

Re: New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

Games seem to benefit greatly from being on an SSD, I'd be inclined to buy a larger one of those, since that's where the majority of the data's going to live. Although if she has a large amount of video, or something space-eating like that, it may as well go on an HDD where it'll be cheap.

Re: New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

You just reminded me of an SSD I have yet to remove from the box. I might start migrating my games to that and see how they fare.

Re: New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

I'm going to go exactly opposite to everybody else here. For that budget, there's no reason NOT to get a Skylake CPU. Get a GTX 980, there's no reason not to have one for the budget. I'd get at least 8GB, possibly even 16GB of RAM at this point. For storage you'll want a large SSD and an HDD, but I don't think games benefit all that much from being on an SSD. If she's anything like me, she's got 3-5 games she plays regularly and then a whole steam library that's rarely played, so I think a 400-500GB SSD should be plenty. Depending on leftover budget I'd consider possibly getting multiple HDDs and mirroring (RAID1) them which will grant additional redundancy and also better read speed to help with loading time the games on that drive.

Re: New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

My understanding is that in terms of processing power there haven't been a whole lot of improvements in CPUs over the past few years. The big improvements seem to be improving bus speeds and the like. I don't really know how that will affect gaming.

For a larger budget like that it may be worth looking at the M.2 PCIE drives. They're expensive but they can be leagues faster than SATA SSDs from a quick look at some specs: SAMSUNG 950 PRO M.2 512GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-V5P512BW - Newegg.com

Re: New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

You say that a new CPU isn't enough of an improvement to buy that over buying a new CPU from last generation, but then recommend an M.2 drive? An SSD is already plenty fast, getting an M.2 drive would not be a noticeable improvement at all.

A 4790k is like $15 cheaper than a 6700k right now on Newegg. IMO it's not even worth considering that when your total budget is so high.

Re: New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

I suspect it depends what sort of games you're looking at. Load times - while they should be small on computers with lots of memory - can still be a real pain in the proverbial. I noticed that Shadows of Mordor, for example, became considerably smoother when placed on the SSD.

Re: New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

She is mostly into MMORPGs and things like that bus has been playing a lot of Fallout 4 lately and does play recent AAA games, but currently on a PS4, so I figure a 980 would be a good shout considering her budget.

Which makes me jelly but anyway.

I'm not sure how much MMORPGS like World of Warcraft benefit from SSD storage, but I know they take up a lot of it, so I'm thinking, considering the budget, weaving a 500GB SSD and perhaps 2x 2TB HDDs in RAID 1 might be a good shout considering how cheap storage is.

Re: New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

Get a SSD for the OS drive, then some HDD for the game storage/etc...

That is the best option IMO.

Re: New build- suggestions / ideas?
 

I was only intending to point out some considerations that may be worth looking into. My system still is running off the 3570k I installed when I built the system 3 years ago. As far as I know the bottleneck is still the GPU (GTX970) when you're talking about gaming.

Also, the fact that a 4790k isn't worthless compared to a 6700k might say something about how much consumers have noticed the improvements.

The following articles cover a bit of the improvements that have been made since Ivy Bridge (2012-2013) CPUs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswel...rchitecture%29 2013-2014: Mostly power/performance optimization, 5-10% performance gains compared to Ivy Bridge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadw...rchitecture%29 2014-2015: move to 14 nm; performance estimates not given

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylak...rchitecture%29 2015-now: DDR4 support, other improved interfaces

I would do anything you can to equip the system with at least a 256 GB SSD. Any time you need to read/write a lot of files an SSD will win by a large margin.