I understand that you most likely get a lot of people asking the same question about what hardware they should use in their first build. Regretfully I am going to add my self to that list of people. I have been educating myself as best I can in all things tech but with it being such a diverse and complex subject I have decided to turn to you guys.
I will start buy telling you what i will need the computer for and if you could use your far superior knowledge to recommend (flattery hopefully will help).
I am going to be using the computer for work (basic stuff such as spreadsheets and PDFs), some spread betting (real time stock charts), playing around with fruity loops (music sampling software), Website building (adobe CS 5, something I am trying to teach myself), editing for YouTube (mainly my girlfriend doing this as she has a channel) and last but not least gaming (nothing too heavy though).
Ok now for the main reason i need you guys (otherwise I would use one of Logan's recommendations i.e. the 1500 dollar editing rig). I need to run 6 to 8 screens.
I don't have a budget, cheaper is better but not to the point where things become a labour of love (i.e. editing).
I live in the UK but also spend about 4-5 months of the year in Amsterdam for work so could get the parts from either the UK or mainland Europe.
If the computer is going to be used for editing it would be a smart choice to go with a nvidia GPU. This being because they have cuda cores; and that increases the editing and rendering performance drastically.
Tell me if you were looking or something cheaper and i'll see what i can do :3
Also if you're planning on upgrading to more than 16GB of ram in the future you're gonna have to get windows 7 professional or ultimate i think it was. Windows Home premium only supports up to 16GB of ram.
The sound card is optional, and by removing it will lower the price by about $200, but here is my configuration for you: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/xgLD
There are 7x140mm fans for a reason - 3x for the case and 4x for the radiator on the NZXT Kraken x60. This build would dominate everything for the next 5 years (64GB of DDR3 2400 RAM...). If you ever needed to, you could just 3xSLI the 4GB EVGA gtx 680 for super power. The reason I didn't use an EVGA gtx 690 is due to the fact that each card is limited by the 2GB of GDDR5 and won't support 6 monitors. This build is just over $4000, so I hope that woulnd't be a problem. Overall, this computer would murder all other computers for at least the next 4 years. Enjoy!
Oh! I forgot that 2400 doesn't work on Sandy Bridge-E! The voltages are off. Here - I changed it to a slightly lower frequency, and added a Blu-Ray reader/writer: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/xhqL
It is a bit cheaper with the lower frequency memory, which put an optical drive, albeit, they are useless, this is the most useful one you could have: BluRay is awesome!
Don't use any lower frequency memory - the 2133 should be the minimum. DDR4 will go well over 3000mHz, and if you don't get some of the faster memory now, your computer wouldn't be competitive. When Ivy Bridge-E comes out, which you might want to wait for, you could get 2400mHz memory instead, adding a bit more longevity to the build, but DDR3 2133 is stil insanely fast. I have 16GB of that G.SKILL Trident X 2400 in my Z77 setup, and it is blazing fast. I never run out of memory, but for editing and to simply take advantage of the features of the motherboard, 64GB is best. Obviously, nothing uses that much memory, but you have freedom to run server(s) on it, and with a 6 core processor, you could host servers without a noticable change in performance. Happy building!
Intel Core i7-3930K 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor and G.Skill Trident X Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3-2400 Memory are not compatible.