First time building a PC, and some questions

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Please be gentle, i know quite a bit, probably the avarege amount. But not enough to go into a scientifical discussion :P . English is not my native tounge for i am Swedish and I live in Sweden. So please excuse the grammar or the misspelling. Please ask if there is something that you do not understand in this topic, conversation (whatever).

I've bin filling my head with information from various tech sources for about 5 months now and still going at it sins i'm very intrested in this kind of stuff. It is how i came across this great community on tek syndicate btw.

I have also bin working hard during the hole summerbreak (I'm 18 btw) and saving a bunch of money in order to fulfill this task (building my pc).
My budget is around 12 000 - 13 000 SEK which should be around 1200 - 1300 USD in the current market for computer hardware.
It is mainly going to be a gaming pc running windows but also for some slight programming (such as Java, PHP, HTML, Jquery and using programs such as Netbeans and Eclipse ) for school and free time.

I'm generally interested in web servers and web designing. (Still a noob though :P).
But i'm probably going to build a seperate machine for that in the future running linux.

There are mainly just some questions that needs to be answered, (I might be putting in some more questions in the slight future. Brace yourselfs! )

  1. 970 or R9 390 ? (for gaming)
  2. Skylake build or Haswell build (i'll save about a 100 USD on a haswell build, is it worth it?)
  3. Any huge performance differences between i5 6600 and i5 6600K ?
  4. Build it myself or let the company that i'm bying the parts from assembly it for me? ( Afraid of DOAs)

I've bin making many lists ( not here ) and have taken many thoughts over several components.

Assumed parts lists:

Skylake build:

  • CPU: i5 6600
  • GPU: Sapphire R9 390 Nitro (alternative: EVGA GTX 970 SSC)
  • PSU: EVGA Supernova G2 650W GOLD
  • Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 3
  • RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2400MHz 8GB (2x4)
  • HDD: WD Blue 1TB
  • SSD: Samsung 850 Evo 120GB
  • Case: Fractal Design Define R5
  • OS: Windows 10 Home

Haswell build:

  • CPU: i5 4690K
  • GPU: Sapphire R9 390 Nitro (alternative: EVGA GTX 970 SSC)
  • PSU: EVGA Supernova G2 650W GOLD
  • Motherboard: MSI Z97 Gaming 3
  • RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600MHz 8GB (2x4)
  • HDD: WD Blue 1TB
  • SSD: Samsung 850 Evo 120GB
  • Case: Fractal Design Define R5
  • OS: Windows 10 Home

Thank you kindly if you can help me :)

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Truth be told, for your purpose either will do you well, the R9 390 has a few driver issues atm but it should be more future proof than the Nvida, once the drivers are ironed out it should be pretty sweet.

I have no issues with your hardware choices, given your budget, they are pretty wise.

Go SkyLake if anything breaks on the haswell it will get increasingly hard to replace.

The the i5 6600K is an unlocked part, this simply means the cpu clock multiplier can be changed, allowing an overclock.

If your budget does not stretch to the K part don't get it, you will not get the most out of it unless you go aftermarket cooling, rather get the stock clock and flip it later for an i7 when you can.

At the end of the day rather get the best GFX card and PSU, the PSU will stick with you longer than you think and the GFX is where you will notice the spend.

I lean towards the AMD simply because of the fact its slightly, slightly more future proof.

Build it your self, you will learn something, plus its not hard.

Much luck in your build.

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Thank you for taking the time to help out! Much appreciated :)

I know that AMD is currently having som driver issues, aspecially with Fallout 4. De driver issues are really the only thing that's pulling me back from getting the 390, but i guess (as you said) when the drivers are fixed i'll be golden. Hopefully soon though :P

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390

Otherwise if you can get unlocked haswell for 100 less than skylake then maybe go for it, otherwise skylake mostly gives you access to USB 3.1 among other things.

Also just use windows 7 until 10 has it's shit together

As far as driver issues I've read reports of issues on either side with windows 10, and it's a bit strange but the 390 bets the 970 at 1440p, but for some reason the 970 wins at 1080p

But overall that should be fixed once AMD releases the optimized drivers for fallout 4, until then you could just run the game at 1440p with VSR and downsample it if your display is 1080p

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