TEMPLATE QUESTIONS:
Budget $600 firm.
I live in the US, so USD.
Prefer Newegg.
WHAT I NEED:
Motherboard, CPU, cooler (also thermal compound recommendations), RAM, possibly a new GPU. I don't need any peripherals. I can donate my current rig's ATX case, HDD, SSD, GPU (GTX 750ti), and PSU (Thermaltake 600w).
This is my living room PC, so it does a few things all day and often simultaneously (BTW I keep the A/C blasting and don't give a damn about power use):
- Play YouTube at 1080/60fps across HDMI or DisplayPort, while playing+streaming extremely heavily modded Minecraft and also managing a Facebook page in Chrome with many extra extensions and scrubbing through hundreds of local and browser images.
- Max res 1080p, no 4k and no 120hz until those kind of awesome things become cheap :/
Other stuff I do:
- Play From The Depths, which is an extremely CPU heavy voxel based RTS. It's like Minecraft but with vehicles and missiles.
- Occasionally I log into Battlefield, and I'd also like to try DayZ and Overwatch.
- Doing CompSci homework (more Chrome windows, Putty, Visual Studio Community with Jetbrains IDE)
I wouldn't mind overclocking, if I can do it with automagic. I wouldn't want to base my $$/performance on overclocking though. I won't be making the investment to custom watercooling anytime soon. After the initial build, I would prefer upgrading my peripherals, GPU, monitors, RAM, then storage, in that order.
I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1 (no longer have the keys or disks) and would like to move it over from the current rig. Not sure how easy that is.
OTHER NOTES:
I've been digging around in PCPartPicker and CPUBenchmark.net. Some of the CPUs I've been looking at include the FX-9590, i5-6600, and E5-1620 v3.
I've already looked into X99 and Z170 and decided between those two I'd probably prefer X99 for it's RAM capacity I could max out later. Minecraft and Chrome eat a lot of RAM and I think I'd like to start with 32GB with this build.
I also thought the 9590 would be fun if it could handle the multitasking load, but I know the 990 chipset is dated as fuck and doesn't offer much RAM or M.2 support.
As I noted, I very rarely play FPS so my GPU is mostly just there to run extra screens. I wouldn't mind picking up an RX-480 if I needed a new GPU.
Of course, these are just my preliminary thoughts. I'm here for advice, so I'm open to anything!