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I think 100 is gonna push it, but to each their own.
This is the one I got from Best Buy for 179, it's cheaper now. Great budget IPS monitor.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-23-...g32&ksdevice=c
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I think if you wait for Black Friday you're probably not going to get much in the way of deals when it comes to cpu and board on Skylake since it's so new. The places you're likely to find real deals will be on the video card, power supply, case, and possibly DDR4 RAM. If you would be willing to drop down to Haswell you'll probably find some great deals on cpu, board, and DDR3 RAM to where I'd imagine you could do an i5 build for the same budget. But it would have little in the way of upgradability since Intel effectively hasn't released a new cpu for LGA 1150 since Devil's Canyon in summer 2014. I know they technically released the i5-5675c and i7-5775c on Broadwell a few months ago, but the release was so limited it might as well have never happened, and the only way to really get them in the US is to overpay hugely for chips imported from Europe. And DDR3 is pretty much dead, I'd be surprised if it doesn't shoot way up in price by the end of 2016 as the supply of it falls off.
This video card any good?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...=ATVPDKIKX0DER
That's a very overpriced card, I wouldn't touch it, especially considering that's going to be a $185 card after tax while newegg doesn't charge sales tax shipping to Texas. You should be able to find a 4GB GTX 960 for a similar price on Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Cyber Monday at newegg / frys / amazon, or at least a 2GB GTX 960. We're nearing the end of the 2GB era in games, it's becoming more common to see games that get significant boosts in performance from having at least 3GB of vram. I mean if your son wants to play games like Team Fortess 2, League of Legends, Minecraft, DOTA 2, CS:GO then a 950 is more than enough to get great framerates at 1080p with graphics maxed. It's kind of funny, newegg has jacked up their prices for a couple of days so the savings can look really big on their sale starting tomorrow(I'm on their mailing list since occasionally they'll send me badass coupons).
Here's a 4GB GTX960 for $194.99, with a $20 rebate, which would come down to $174.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...4127894&cm_sp=
Here's the rebate link (ends Nov 30):
https://msi.4myrebate.com/?oc=MSI-15902
EDIT: Also, if you're buying from NewEgg, try the codes 20now or 15now for 20% or 15% off (can only use one)
Last edited by ElNono; 11-21-2015 at 08:09 PM.
FWIW, always check slickdeals.com for deals like this
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Was on newegg and saw this. Seems like a good deal. CPU is a step up, but the video card is a step down.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...Tpk=83-227-641
But this deal also includes Windows license and free SSD.
^ too many questions about a box like that, IMO. What kind of RAM does it have? What kind of motherboard and connectivity options? what's the 1TB drive like (5400 RPM, 7200 RPM, etc)...
Looks like good value, but I would tell you that if you're building this to play games and you want it to last you a bit longer, don't skimp out on the graphics card.
I built my own gaming PC a few months ago, and after reading a lot, the 4GB GTX 960 looked like the lowest you wanna go while having a bit of futureproof... really, the 970 was ideal, but too pricey for me at the time...
Yeah, I decided not to pull the trigger on that one.
I bought the i3 6100 system recommended by baseline bum (with a couple of changes). Total was $550, including monitor. And that includes the 4GB GTX 960.
so is an i5-6600k a waste of money when only paired with a gtx960?
I have the 960 and mostly just want to upgrade to DDR4 and PCIE3 and am floundering on which processor to get.
The free SSD in this bundle is a ty one, too
Nice. I was actually planning on getting that Skylake i3 processor for my build, but it wasn't available at the time.
Not really. Some games are more CPU bound and will take advantage of the 4 cores, regardless if they're pushing your video card to the limit or not.
The question is really if you need a 6600k... if you don't overclock, you could probably save $50 and get a i5-6500 instead. A little slower clock per core, but you're still comfortably over 3Ghz...
FWIW, PCIE3 is available on previous gen Z97 boards... but for DDR4 you do need the new gen mobos... although the biggest difference between DDR3 and DDR4 is noticeable in 2 or less core CPUs... when you hit 4 cores with a good sized cache, the difference is smaller...
I could take or leave overclocking, but I do have a liquid cooler, so... lets say for Fallout 4, will I gain anything in from a mildly overclocked 6600k vs a 6500 or 6400?
Frankly, I don't know Fallout 4 is a game that pushes many boundaries hardware-wise... I run it on a i5-4590 with a GTX 960 4G, and it looks great.
I'm gonna let baseline bum chime in on this...
Lol, I forgot to buy a hard drive. I may hold out for a really good deal on a Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD.
Unless SSD not that crucial for gaming.
Last edited by DarrinS; 11-22-2015 at 12:14 PM.
Meh, so point dropping in an expensive SSD into a budget build -- went ahead and got a cheap 1tb 7200 rpm internal hd.
How the did you swing all that for $550?
The i3-6100 combined with fast ram is a pretty damn impressive chip.
Obviously your framerates won't be that good as their's since they're using a $1000 an X for the gpu, but I think it's ideal for getting a strong but affordable cpu to get in on the Skylake platform with perhaps an eye to upgrade in 2017 or 2018.
Jump on it, it's $135 today at newegg with promo code EMCKKNN28, and it comes with a game code for Assassin's Creed Syndicate too.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820147373
An SSD won't improve anything in gaming though other than load times though.
Fallout 4 is pretty badly optimized, it actually can be a real bas on one's cpu.
I'd stay away from the i5-6400 since it only boosts to 3.1 GHz on quadcore loads (which any recent game will be). It's fairly normal for games to pin every core of an i5 at 95% usage, so the clockspeed definitely matters. The i5-6600 would be a better choice since it goes to 3.6 GHz on quadcore loads. With the way games are now distributing load across 8 threads I'd really look at the i7-6700k or even the i7-5820k if you want to go high end though. 2013 and before it was really rare to see a game using all 8 threads of an i7 (threads 5-8 were mostly idle), but now with the consoles being effective octacores (really two quadcore cpus) most games can split load across the 8 threads. But it's a of a jump in price, and that's not even factoring in the cost of the Z170 platform. It's too bad Intel neutered their Xeon E3s in Skylake to use only server boards, as it was nice loophole in Sandy Bridge through Haswell to get a locked i7 for $60 less. But they did since you can do BCLCK overclocking on Z170 and it would kill i7-6700k sales.
I guess it depends on how often you upgrade your gpu though. 2016 should have some pretty significant improvements in performance with the shrink from 28 nm to 16 nm. To give an idea of what has happened with node shrinks, the GTX 580 at 40 nm gets destroyed by the GTX 680 at 28 nm. We're talking like a 30-40% difference in framerate from Fermi after the node shrink in Kepler. And the 680 was never a flagship card. The node shrink was such a big deal that Nvidia promoted their upper midrange card to the 80 series (GTX 680 was originally supposed to be called the GTX 670 Ti) and they invented a whole new series for their flagship: an. So really, the difference after node shrink in flagships was GTX 580 vs GTX an. They just invented a new $1000 price point and moved their upper midrange chip to the 580's flagship $500 price point, and they got away with it because the performance difference was night and day.
So you may find when you buy a new $200 gpu in 2017 or 2018 that you're getting something more powerful than the GTX 980, so that's something to factor into your cpu choice since cpus are tending to be pretty long lived these days.
How the did you swing all that for $550?
The i3-6100 combined with fast ram is a pretty damn impressive chip.
$19 case
$90 monitor (50% off)
It's not crucial, but I'm a huge fan of SSDs just for windows... especially since you can get a 128GB one for under $50 these days... nothing like booting up in like 6 secs if your mobo supports UEFI and fast boot.
I ended up getting a 250GB SSD, but only 44GB are used right now by Windows, so you can definitely get away with a 128GB boot drive. I then added an extra 1TB harddrive for the games.
I might end up swapping the 1TB for a 3-4 TB HD later down the road.
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