Hello everyone, as of late I have managed to convert my Uncle to the glorious PC Gaming Master Race (hail mighty Gaben!) He has been an Xbox 360 fan for about four years now and is disappointed with the state of the new Xbone and came to me looking for a gaming PC. He game me 1,300 USD budget for a rig and said to get him what I can to play a lot of games with Ultra settings.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/7Y2yt6
That is the link to the parts I have chose, as far as an OS I will be getting him a gift of Windows 8.1 and downloading start is back to not only save him about $150 but also show him how nice the community of PC gaming actually is compared to the screaming twelve year olds on Xbox Live. Also I ripped a optical drive out of an old dell I have sitting around here because he likes CD's...silly old man...
I was wondering if there was anything I should change, Intel, Nvidia, or AMD, it doesn't really bother me any I love all three.
If it were my money I would go for something like this; It will look good, be very fast, and it will be quiet which is nice. Personally for me, I don't see a reason to go with anything less then a R290 in a new rig anymore; the price to performance just is not there. If you prefer the green team 780s aren't too much more money (around 100$ add for a good aftermarket one).
Also as a thought while AMD CPUs are worse in single threaded apps a FX 8350 makes a compelling argument at this price range. It nets you a better motherboard for the same cost, or a overall cheaper build without any noticeable difference is performance.
The reason I went with the higher end CPU and stuff is because I find upgrading the motherboard and CPU when a new one comes out that is worth the upgrade is a bit annoying and a graphics card is much easier. But I see what you mean. The 12GB over the 8 was he is one of those people who enjoys having like 30 things running at once for some reason so I feel that that plus heavy gaming he may need it. But the 290 does seem to be the better choice so I will probably go with that.
Xeon is a good choice for some builds, but, for gaming an i5 will beat it black and blue, and for multithreaded apps a FX should hold its own for less money. I don't think its a bad choice by any means; just for a gaming rig it seems out of place. Also I'm not sure you can overclock Xeons which for this kind of computer is a little lame.
Still if you were going to use this build as a more general computer, IE. maybe do some video or music editing on it a Xeon is a strong choice. Worth consideration; at-least it will not bottleneck the graphics card and should still give solid FPS in games. Also, as a added bonus you can get away with less cooling on the CPU so you save a little bit of money there. Personally, I wouldn't be inclined to use a Xeon on anything but a workstation type computer, or something where the extra features of the Xeon are required for safe operation. The extra performance from overclocking combined with just having more plain old muscle makes the i5 a stronger gaming CPU.
Xeons are perfectly fine for gaming. The Xeons are literally the exact same thing as an i7. The only differences are that the Xeons have ECC support, don't have integrated graphics (why would you need it anyway with a dedicated GPU?), and consume about 4 watts less at full speed.
And let's not forget that the OP stated that the user multi-tasks like its a religion, so those extra four threads over an i5 will probably come in handy. I can run Folding@Home at full speed on my CPU and game at the same time on my Xeon and get minimal stuttering during gameplay.
Actually that Xeon is just an i7 without iGPU and a locked multiplier. So while it wouldn't be able to compete with an overclocked i7 (or overclocked i5 in games that don't use HT, and maybe even in those that do) it gives the multithreaded capabilities of an i7 for a significantly lower price.
If a rig were going to be used for gaming and highly threaded tasks, the 1230 v3 would be a great CPU for the price. But in a pure gaming rig I am personally more inclined to go with an unlocked i5, but that's just my preference.
The problem with doing both simultaneously is that the temp heads straight for 70C with the stock HSF. It never got above that though, so I don't think that it would cause too much issue with moderate gaming use.
E3 Xeons are locked i7s with no integrated graphics. They should run a tiny bit cooler than an i7, and consume around the same amount of power. Same cooler on an i7 can be used on a Xeon!
Pretty much what Some Tech Noob wrote. Uses a little less power than an i7 under load, runs a little cooler, and will use the same coolers as any i3/i5/i7 processor. I have a Xeon E3 1230 V2, which is a socket 1155 chip, and any modern cooler works. It currently has a Cryorig C1 on it that work just fine.