Help me build my new PC?

Hey guys, new to the site, so I'm going to just go off the format provided in the guidlines.


First a little background: I'm not necissarily new to PC gaming. I've been gaming on my laptop for a couple years now. I have a Lenovo Ideapad with an AMD A-10 4600M APU with an AMD Radeon HD 7660G. I have over 100 games on steam and I'm really loving PC gaming so far. But with this laptop I can only go so far, most games I can play at medium settings for a semi-decent framerate, while games like Battlefield 3 I can only play at the lowest settings with about 20-25 FPS. So long story short, I'm ready for an upgrade.

  • Budget. I'd say around 1500, possibly bump it up to 2000 if need be.
  • Where do you live: United States
  • No Retailer preferred, I like using newegg and amazon, but I'm mostly concerned about getting the best deals for the parts.
  • I'm going to need peripherals, definitely.
  • What will you be using your future computer for? Gaming, and I want to emulate using the Dolphin emulator.
  • Do you overclock or want to get into overclocking? Its not a requirement for me but I'm willing to try it out if it will get me better performance.
  • Do you plan on going for custom watercooling now, or in the future? For this build, No.
  • OS. Do you need a new one? Yes, I plan on getting either Windows 7 or 8.1. I want to hear reasons why one is preferred over the other.
  • What kind of settings do you like or what FPS do you want to play at? I want to be able to play most games at Max settings.
  • What resolution will you be playing at? I would like to be able to play games at 1080p.
  • What kind of games do you like to play? I like to play all kinds of games, I'm going to post a link to my steam profile just so you can see what I have, but I'm one of those gamers who likes to play a little bit of everything.
  • What kind of keyboard do you prefer? Mechanical, LED backlit preferred.
  • What type of mouse-grip do you have? Palm, claw, combination? I've never really used a mouse with a grip.
  • The only MMO I play is FFXIV as of now, occasionally I go back to EVE online.
  • What size monitor are you looking for, and what resolution? Screen type (IPS, S-IPS, TN, etc.), hertz (60, 120, etc.) This is where I need some help, all I want is something affordable while still looks good.

Thats about it, if theres anything I missed, let me know and I will be sure to clarify.

Steam : http://steamcommunity.com/id/halojedi360

Hey man, welcome to the forum. You can do a LOT with 1500 bucks :) but here is a general system that I would recommend, http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/partlist/. Now I did not include an operating system. windows 7 64-bit is 92 bucks. This pc will literally play ANYTHING at a fantastic 60-70+ framerate. I have 1 stick of 8gigs of ram so that maybe in the future you could pick up 1 or 2 or 3 more sticks to get more ram, and so that if you max out the ram slots you can have 32 gigs :). As for the power supply, that is wayy more power than you need, which is good so that everything can run happily like little kittens :3. the case is completely optional, the water-cooler is as well. Hope this helped man!

The link you posted isn't working for me, are you sure you posted it right?

top left permalink, please!

Don't quite know about monitors enough to recommend one.

Some build to work with: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2hvKs

Things you could change:

8GB of RAM would probably be sufficient for gaming, but games are starting to push and use more and more RAM.

SSD: Adata XPG is a pretty good SSD.  You can save some money if you don't need that much space with a ~128gb SSD.

GPU: If you don't mind a loud and hot card, the R9 290 is a great card(if you can find one, that is)

This build is upgradeable to use two graphics cards in SLI/Crossfire.  I feel that someone can still do better for the money, but this is a decent intel build to start out with as a baseline.