So my friend wants a build, with $700 being his limit.
I of course always prefer intel and nvidia, but I came to this site to learn, and I will be open to all builds, and if you mention an AMD/ATI card/CPU could you post the Intel/NVidia equivalent? Or I could look that up myself.
So, for starters, I'm about to do some room cleaning...funeral tonight and I was gifted some of the clothes. Anyways, to the topic, I will do some research after this, but thought I would post this first to get some responses early on. I build my PC as a i5 2500k Sandy Bridge with a 560Ti later upgrade to 2x 560Tis with 8GB DDR3 ram. Now, I have been a bit out of date on the cards that have come out, and which chipset would be best for gaming, with video editing on the side (he makes short movies, and wants to get into film making).
Now, I'm fairly good at looking up GPUs, their FPS benchmarks for games, and judging what to get by that. If any of you want to educate me more on what I SHOULD be looking at, or have good card suggestions, please feel free to mention that.
Same goes with CPU, but I was just going to look at an i5 with around 3GHz clock, as well as the cheapest DDR3 RAM I can find, probably 8GB. This said, again, I don't actually know the WHY for my choices. My CPU never stressed out even on modded Skyrim so I assume a similar processor would be good, or even better since they're the new chipsets. Oh....I forgot Ivy Bridge is done and gone...it's Haswell now....wow. As a side note, and I missing out on anything by having Sandy Bridge and not a Haswell chip? I'm not in the situation to upgrade quite yet but...I feel behind despite being able to run all games maxed out most of the time.
Also HDDs, if you guys recommend anything that would be nice. Was going to look into a 500GB-1TB Caviar black, but again, all I know is my Caviar Black I got because it was faster than the blue and the green, but again, I still don't know much. Just that it reads and writes faster, but I'm not sure if the other stats matter a ton, or if that speed is even good for the price.
Now....motherboards. I know JACK SHIT here. I know it needs to be for the right chipset, and it needs the slots I want. That is ALL I know. Who knows, maybe there isn't much more things of importance to know...maybe there is a ton. I am really lacking on knowledge here. My ex recommend my P67A-GD65 MSI MB and it's a beast and runs great. However, only got it really because the local store had it on sale and she said it was great for the price.
Oh and PSU....I think you're following the theme. All I know is, see wattage, get the right wattage. If a sale, get enough wattage to SLI, for adding a second GPU in 2-3 years to wipe away the signs of aging on your PC for a way smaller price than a new PC.
All help is appreciated. You could just post builds for the price, or explain more on where my knowledge fails me.