Best 1500$-2000$ gaming PC to max out all games 1440p

[Muath B]

Dear fellas, members of this great community,

Oh this is going to be a long post! Lol. Just bear with me a little as I am new to building PCs and I have so little information regarding numerous number of parts that are found in the market these days.

What I am looking forward to build is a gaming PC that can run all games, with ultra (max, high) graphics, at either 1080p or 1440p with an average FPS above 50, with one monitor only. Side note: I don't know how to overclock components.

Games I am looking forward to trying include:
- Crysis 3.
- Battlefield 4.
- Far Cry 4.
- Hitman: Absolution.
- The Witcher 3.
- Watch Dogs.

My budget: 1500$-2000$.

Now my questions are:

1- Should I go with a X99 Chipset, or is the X79 enough? I am torn between an Intel i7 5820k, along with 2133 DDR4 RAM, or an i7 4790k with 1600 DDR3.

I mean, will the 4790k be enough for such tasks?

2- How much RAM am I going to need? 16GB, or 8GB? Also, with the i7 4790k, can I use a RAM with over 1600?

3- Regarding the GPU, I am torn between those 4:
a- EVGA GTX980 Superclocked ACX 2.0 4GB GDDR5.
b- GTX 970.
c- GTX 790Ti.
d- Sapphire Radeon R9 290 4GB GDDR5.

Please note: with regards to the price of each, which of those 4 can be selected to meet the tasks that I mentioned above? It's OK if I need 2 graphic cards from any of those 4, but then I need some advice regarding which motherboard to choose (that supports 2 cards), and which case as well.

I am leaning towards 1 card, and I understand that the GTX980 is the best, but will it be enough? Or should I go with 2 Sapphire Radeon for instance?

4- Regarding the motherboard, I know nothing about selecting the right one. As I said, I don't know anything about overclocking, so what is the best budget motherboard to meet my needs? How do I know which ones to look for to start with?

5- Same as point no.4, but for the Case, CPU cooler and Power supply. I don't need anything fancy, just something good with budget price that gets the job done. Please keep in mind that I might need 2 GPUs, so when selecting a case for instance, there need to be space for this, with good airflow. In selecting a case I also want it to include fans. I need sufficient cooling!

6- Can someone explain to me these things: Full tower case, ATX motherboard. I really don't know about what to choose for my build!

Waiting for your replies, and sorry for my "noobness" and the long post.

Best wishes from Muath B.

 

[Muath B]

Any answers please?

 

[Philipp Wagner]

did you checked some builds on youtube?
you have to follow a strategy dude! try to hit a certain budget or your "max performance for what is on market now". Then filter your components and post your A,B and C options

 

[Amywalker730]

I have just finished finalizing my own build with an identical aim and budget. What I am listing is my own selections after doing a solid 4 months of research into it.

1. In my humble opinion the x99 platform is not yet suited for gaming, especially when you consider the price to performance ratio. The $250 4790k outperforms the $500 5930K, and RAM has very little influence over in-game performance. You would be spending a good $500 for something that wouldn't help your gaming experience. Now if you do more than gaming that would be another story. The x99 is an improvement for people into encoding videos. not really worth the price to me, 20% less time waiting for videos to finish is worth different amounts to different people.

2. Ram is not particularly useful when it comes to gaming. 8GB is really good enough, and 16GB should be the absolute limit. Anything beyond that is just useless for a gamer. I bought 8GB @ 1866 at 9-9-9-9, 7 years ago. I have yet to suffer any-sort of bottle-necking from it in my $2.3k build. Now over the next decade I doubt 8GB will be enough for gaming, so if you have the money to spare I'd recommend getting 16GB. Keep in mind that speed and timing act like a bit of a seasaw. Increasing one will decrease the other and it gets to the point that there is no performance increase at all. 1866 at 9 or lower will essentially be identical to 2400 at 11, yet there will be a $60 price increase.

Ram lower than 1600 you will begin to get into where it would affect performance, though still by miniscule levels. From the benchmarks I've seen the difference between 1600 @ 8 - 8- 8 -8 and 24 at 10-11-11-11 is 1FPS.

3. This is not a contest; the GTX 970 blows everything else away. You would be getting a card that is 40% cheaper and just 10% less powerful compared to the 980 and 780Ti, yet it is in an OC SLI configuration where it scores the killing blow. In an overclocked state the GTX 970 will beat out an overclocked 780Ti by 5 – 10FPS in most games. The Maxwell architecture simply destroys the Kepler in power efficiency, allowing them to be pushed so much more. Against the GTX 980 it will still come up approximately 10% short in power, but that is more than made up for with its price to performance rate in SLI. For $700 you can have a set-up that is will see roughly twice the performance of the single $600 GTX 980 card. That is without overclocking too. The card can be overclocked to match the 980 in performance, though as I said before the 980 can be overclocked by the same ratio as well. Even if you do not overclock, the card is still pretty damned impressive and buying two will destroy any other setup you could get.

The R9 290 is a lot more comparable to the 970, both in price and performance. Looking at its benchmarks it seems to perform 12% less, but it also has a lower price-point that could save you $60 in a Crossfire configuration. I still recommend the 970, but it might be worth looking around for more information as to how these two cards stack-up against eachother.

4. I’m in the same club. Motherboards are not my area, but I finally decided upon the ASUS Maximum Hero 7 myself. It has plenty of room for expansion and has received great reviews. Its biggest strength is overclocking, though as you said you don’t do that so this point would be a bit hammered down. Still, when you need to redo your build in 8 years to keep at the top, you could look into overclocking. It’s a great way to squeeze that extra bit of life out of your fading rig, keeping it alive for the next year or two while you look for deals on the overhaul.
The Hero 7 is not the cheapest board, at $175 from TigerDirect (Now is a great time to buy, it’s normally $230), but it is a solid platform for you to learn the more advanced features of PC gaming with. The thing to keep in mind is that all of your parts hook into your motherboard, so ensuring that they are compatible with it is an absolute must. If you go with the 4790k and twin 970s then you won’t need to worry about them. The board matches the LGA 1150 socket type for that CPU and has enough PCI-E slots to maximize your x2 SLI configuration. You would need to look into compatible RAM sticks, I recommend looking through the QVL for the board and look at what is ensured to work. (If your RAM isn’t listed then by no means is that a red-flag that it won’t work or perform as intended, it just was not tested by ASUS)

5. Assuming my build, you would be sitting at around $1,200, and right now is an excellent time to get a PSU, case, and an SSD. With Black Friday there are lots of steep discounts for these items. Cases are really all about your own preferences and what suits your setup. For my case I took the Storm Styrker, which is an excellent design for airflow and expandability, and there is a black version that is called the Storm Trooper if white isn’t your preference. For just $100 you won’t do much better. It comes with a ton of ports for fans, air-flow direction options, a handle, easy-cleaner panels, and plenty of front USB 3.0 ports. It even has a hidden compartment that serves as a lock-chest. It’s a novelty and not really useful, but still it’s cool. 😛
It’s a really solid case in my opinion, but as I said when it comes to cases it’s just as much about your own aesthetic preference as function. This particular case just happens to fulfill both for me really well.
6. This is again a mostly aesthetics and preference thing, but it’s also extremely important that your motherboard can fit inside of your case. An ATX Mini for instance can fit inside a tower-case, but an ATX cannot fit inside a mini-case.

A tower-case is the largest case you can get (The Styker I recommended is a tower-case). It can fit any sized motherboard inside and has great room for expandability, that is to say all of your hardware will fit inside and you don’t really need to worry if your bulky cooling systems will fit.


Wiki has a good explanation for the different sizes of motherboards. Scroll down to the section for Variations. It has a picture and size chart for the various motherboard types.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX

Personally I recommend the tower+ ATX form motherboard for an enthusiast gamer. Their size will help with heat reduction and give plenty of room to both work with and expand your build as you wish.

 

[cats_Paw]

1 X79
2 16GB (just to be safe, I agree that 8 GB is fine for most cases). Dont worry that much about RAM MhZ (they higher the MhZ, the higher the timings, so it cancels each other out. Usually the improvement is marginal if any).
3 970. Save the extra cash for later to upgrade it when its meaning full. 980 has too much diminishing returns.
4 ASrock has good budget Motherboards. Again, marginal improvements from one board to another. Also, overclocking is for the most part is not even required with a good i7.
5 In terms of cooling for CPU: Get a closed waterloop like corsair H100. Two reasons: Air coolers that are great are VERY heavy, and are more capable to damage your motherboard, and two, water coolers are quieter while still good.
In terms of case: If you can, get a case that is rather big, and has few fans. Study airflow dynamics and make the holes and install extra fans yourself. NO case has a good airflow system because the manufacturers do not know what you will have inside the case exactly.*
6 Full tower means big cases (as in mucho space for many extra things. More expensive but easier to work inside it). ATX motherboard means the type of layout for your motherboard (so if the motherboard is ATX, the case must be ATX compatible; if the motherboard is E-ATX, the case has to be E-ATX compatible; etc).

*I personally created my own case form a Kandalf LCS case and i dont think I will ever buy another case: most cases are really bad at creating good airflow because for some reason they try to force air IN from one side or two sides and exhaust from more than one. That creates air corridors (think of how a river flows) that have cool air, but hot bubbles where air barely moves.
You want to have ALL the air in the case to be replaced, and for that you need to force the air to go a certain path (remember that air will look for the corridor where there is less resistance to exit).