Out of of gaming for 2 years, need build advice £1500-1800

Well waiting is not really an option then, is it ;-)

I don't see the point of spending £60 on a stop-gap Pentium K and then plug a broadwell i5 or i7 in as I don't think there would be many takers for a second hand Pentium K
 
YOUR BASKET
1 x Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Tri-X OC 8192MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (11226-17-20G) £329.99
1 x Intel 5820K 3.30GHz (Haswell-E) Socket LGA2011-V3 Processor - Retail (BX80648I75820K) £329.99
1 x Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 ATX Motherboard £218.99
1 x Samsung 500GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 32 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-75E500B/EU) £199.99
1 x Kingston Predator 16GB (4x4GB) DDR4 PC4-21300C13 2666MHz Quad Channel Kit - Black (HX426C13PB2K4/16) £191.99
1 x EVGA SuperNova G2 850W '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £114.95
1 x Corsair Hydro H100i GTX 240mm High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler (CW-9060021-WW) £101.99
1 x NZXT H440 Midi-Tower - Black / Orange £89.99
1 x CableMod E-Series G2 & P2 Cable Kit - Black / Orange £69.95
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD £66.98
Total : £1,732.50 (includes shipping : £14.75).




Black+orange.

SOC Champion!!! best X99 board smashing world records at HWbot.
 
 
Playing at 3440x1440p means you'll be more GPU bound than CPU bound. Games that are CPU-bound aren't really CPU-bound so much as single/dual-core bound. What this means is that unless you're looking to do a Quad SLI going the Haswell-E route is a waste of money. Challenge anyone that's advising you to do that to back up that advice with real world benchmarks at that resolution. If you click here for 4K benchmarks you can see that CPU is pretty irrelevant at this resolution so long as it's at least i5. This means that buying anything other than an i5 4690K is a waste of money. Except if you want to run 4 GPUs (which I wouldn't recommend anyway) or do some other serious CPU-heavy tasks, but that's not gaming.

As for the GPU, it's a toss-up between the R9 295x2 or the Titan X. If the games you play have crossfire profiles then the 295x2 is a much better choice than the Titan X since it has both better performance and is cheaper.

Lastly, rules of thumb are: Any RAM is fine, speed makes no difference for gaming performance and DDR4 is overpriced and pointless for gaming.
Motherboard-wise, most 100 pounds boards can achieve good OCs and do crossfire/sli and also have M.2 slots.
For coolers, most good air coolers are around 50 quid (I like phantek ph-tc14pe most) and the closed loop coolers are simply more expensive for the same performance but look cooler (I guess).
For SSDs I'd avoid Samsung for now as they've had a few controversies with their EVO series and it's not worth the hassle when equivalent alternatives are available (Crucial ones are pretty good).

Do not remove moderator comments.
 
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stulid said:
YOUR BASKET
1 x Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Tri-X OC 8192MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (11226-17-20G) £329.99
1 x Intel 5820K 3.30GHz (Haswell-E) Socket LGA2011-V3 Processor - Retail (BX80648I75820K) £329.99
1 x Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 ATX Motherboard £218.99
1 x Samsung 500GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 32 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-75E500B/EU) £199.99
1 x Kingston Predator 16GB (4x4GB) DDR4 PC4-21300C13 2666MHz Quad Channel Kit - Black (HX426C13PB2K4/16) £191.99
1 x EVGA SuperNova G2 850W '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £114.95
1 x Corsair Hydro H100i GTX 240mm High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler (CW-9060021-WW) £101.99
1 x NZXT H440 Midi-Tower - Black / Orange £89.99
1 x CableMod E-Series G2 & P2 Cable Kit - Black / Orange £69.95
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD £66.98
Total : £1,732.50 (includes shipping : £14.75).




Black+orange.

SOC Champion!!! best X99 board smashing world records at HWbot.
Click to expand...
Very nice build.
 
well, back in the UK in two weeks so going to start the build then. Still undecided on a couple of parts but should be ready by then. I'll post pics etc as I build
 
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