Hey interweb peeps. Thanks in advance for reading this. Please forgive my English, I know it's shit on the internet.
I have built several PCs for other people, but never one for myself. And to quote the marine from the trailer of Starcraft 2 "Hell it's about time." I want to do this reasonably for a reasonable price, of course that's from my perspective. (My parents think it's crazy if you spend over $20 on headphones and $500 on a PC; my views are obviously different).
Anyways, I want to develop some games (mostly for shits and giggles), do some rendering, and other similar productivity stuff. But my current laptop is pretty pathetic when handling those types of loads; it has an i7-4500u, 8gb ram, gt 820m. And some of the minimum specs for programs I intend to use are: quad core processor (the i7 is 2 core 4 threads), 8gb ram, and a dx11 capable video card (slightly ambiguous with this). So for my PC build I wanted 4 cores, hyper threaded was a bonus, so I was limited to i5s, i7s, and Xeons. 8gb or 16gb of Ram (high speed ddr4 would've been nice). And some gpu in the 150-300 USD range.
So here is the parts I eventually grabbed & why: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/hCTZsY
Xeon 1231v3 - Basically an i7 without an iGPU for around $100 less.
16GB RAM - It was just a little more than 8GB so why not.
GTX 970 - Low power consumption, some (proprietary shit) software, $50 less than the R9 390 in my case.
The rest was the cheapest I could grab that were decent quality.
Now, on to the setup, or as I like to call this project "Setupdate" Well I just realized I lost all my photos of before and after of what I could do currently for free. Oh well... Anyways right now I got two desks that form an L in the corner of my room. The walls and carpet are ugly and stained baby blue and this bodily organ purple respectively. My plans are to change the carpet to a more mute color that's closer to a grey; same thing with the walls. My desk is going to be one with pipes and plywood; going to coat the pipes in that rubber spray because it's rusting right now lol. I plan to stain the wood a greyish-black; also doing a matte or semi matte finish. Of course I'd get a Tek Syndicate mat to top that off!
Thanks again if you read this far.
Planned Follow Up! Lots of pictures, maybe videos too. Before and after pictures too. Benchmarks.