A good start?

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1

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3rlZj

im thinking this would be a good platform to build off of

various friends of mine wish to get a computer like mine,

but none of them can dish out the money for parts all at once.

if i can talk them into upgrades in steps, and stages to save on parts 

to this

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3rmxW

 which is also the final spec. i'm going for in my rig

this is a debate on feasibility not parts. i will not consider amd parts,

im looking to swap Parts in and out of 5 computers interchangeably to ease maintenance and upgrades  

they will have this motherboard regardless of price (Asus Z87 pro)

they will have this case regardless of price (fractal design define r4)

they will have windows 8 64 bit

 

2

You could look at getting a single 8GB stick and then upgrading to the second stick later. Also, you could look at dropping to a Haswell Pentium to help save some money at the start.

Also, I'd personally just get the final power supply to begin with.

3

http://www.frys.com/product/7680527

i5 for $99. 

4

If you do not plan on overclocking the xeon even outperforms the I5 4670k

so does the 660 outperform the 750

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3rn8r

5

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3rnjj

i have to agree with you 

6

i will be heavily overclocking at least 3 of the 5 i plan on building  

7

they also sad they want something as close to mine as possible with only minor tweaks which will make building them in steps a snap   

8

why not a FX8320 based build? better bang for buck for most games then an i5.

Unless you play older single threaded games offcourse, then the i5 would be better.

9

because it will be a hard sell, that i don't feel is worth the headache.

i have a friend who has a FX8320 and the amd equivalent of my 770. side by side our systems run nearly the same, my boot time is a hair faster. but honestly there is no noticeable benefit and no magic= not worth the headache of telling them to go amd on a $2000 investment when i went Intel with my investment.     

10

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3robR

OR

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3rodf

In my opinion either will walk all over pretty much any Intel build at that price point. 

11

the price point is $2000, they all know it, they just want the computers sooner so im looking for help on which corners to cut to give them something that will not have to be totally replaced to upgrade. 

12

is overclocking an issue? otherwise you could offcourse look into the Xeon E3-1230V3 as an option. its a i7-4770 without the igpu, but its just a few bucks more then the i5 if im right. Offcourse for just gaming it does not matter much but for gaming and streaming, or some video editing and stuff it could make sense, those extra threads power.

13

for my personal rig maybe, but for the others they want to overclock the snot out of them