My friend, an Xbox gamer for 4 years has seen the light and is ready to make the jump over to PC. He wants to experience the latest and best looking games like Arma 3, Rust, and Battlefield all at the same time being future proof enough to play any PC game into the future for 2 years in 4k, 60fps, mostly ultra. His budget is no more than $2100, preferably around $2050. These are in $USD$ and are being bought in the US. Note that the keyboard that has been picked is final, he wants his PC to look good, and he prefers a blue color scheme. We can't wait to hear your advice on any better parts without breaking the limit! Or Cheaper parts that do the same thing!
EDIT: The build above is my old build but after advice from this forum I've chosen the following build for 1440p 144hz FreeSync Gameplay. I'm still open to suggestions but it's almost final! PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
Personally I'd stick with 1440p. you aren't going to get a good experience with 4K right now. no card can do it all that well in all honesty. not even the 980ti/Titan X. also nothing is future proof. however at 1440p the high end cards annihilate. you can get to the mid 60s to 70s depending the game.
Also the Keyboard. I understand it's been chosen but i switched it out for a Blue LED and Cherry MX blues cheaper alternative from Cooler Master. I've been using Corsair Keyboards for about a year now. and i have about 6 Dead LED keys. they're pretty but they come with that con.
Most if not all the high end cards annihilate at 1440p. which is going to be good for you. (which btw I switched out that 4k monitor for a 1440p one.)
Also i threw in a bunch of new components. since he can afford the Z170 chipset might as well throw that in there as well.
As for the Blue Scheme. the chipset is new and doesn't have blue motherboards. but i assure you the motherboard i threw in there is an eye candy. i also threw in some Blue LED fans to bring in some static pressure to the water cooler i threw in there. to the PC.
@Streetguru Maybe having a 4k PC was a bit too ambitious with the budget and I'll see about altering the build a bit for 1440p, however your suggestion cuts a bit too much power from the PC from where it matters. The CPU is very nice but most video games require more GPU focus. The 390x is nice but pretty much a 290x and (as a 290x user I say this) is worse than a 980ti. However you think we're spending too much for a PC that's going to do 1440p 60fps then what would you say we should spend the money on? I know you suggested that 40 inch monitor but that's way too big for the allocated computer space he has.
@Kat It seems like 4k was maybe a bad idea, we've accepted the fact that 4k was a bit too ambitious. Your looks nice but i should have included that my friend being a new PC user is not going to overclock his GPU or his CPU so the i5-6600k doesn't seem too good for him. I've built a few PCs but I'm by no means an expert on some parts like motherboard, what would the advantage of your board be over the one that I picked? The RAM seems fine, storage is a bit small since he wants a lot of games. The guy above you also suggested a Radeon but I was under the impression that the 980ti was the best card out there? He'd prefer an ATX case but if its not possible with a 1440p build then we're willing to compromise. Finally while the keyboard is a lot cheaper he would prefer to stick with the Corsair K95 RGB especially after seeing mine. Though I am liking that 1440p 144Hz monitor. Do you think he will have problems with reaching 144 fps on higher-end games?
@ProSonicLive Your build is nice and cheaper, but the problem is that he doesn't really know how to use multiple hard drives and I suspect he'll download everything onto the C: drive which I why I got him a single 3TB. Also every comment I've gotten so far has included a Radeon GPU; I was thought that the 980ti was best card out at the moment?
I forgot to mention, the build is open to crossfired 390s, which will out perform a single 980 ti where applicable, so he'd just have to live with a single 390 for a while, but you have a nice monitor capable of free-sync that's 4k.
None really. the motherboard I've chosen has gaming centric features. like higher quality audio. it has support for all the newest latest features like M.2 solid state drive support. it has USB 3.1 Type C. (which is a nice feature to have) also re-enforced PCiE slots. those silver stuff on the PCiE slots are brackets to keep the slot sturdy when using heavy graphics cards. in other words to minimize the sagging on heavy ass graphics cards.
As for the overclock-able CPU. i mean he doesn't HAVE to have it. but if ever wanted to overclock in the future he can. i mean it's free performance I don't see why not lol you can push like 4.4ghz or 4.5 he ever wanted to. of course he doesn't have to but if he becomes much more tech savvy he could learn and enjoy the free performance boost.
the SSD is for the Operating system and the terabyte is for the games and all that. mind you 1TB is sufficient. i don't really recommend he installs EVERY single game in his library. (yes it's convenient) but after a while he will start noticing it take up space when he rarely plays the game (just a random scenario) but that's why i threw in the 1TB. plus it's an excellent 1TB for cheap.
It is, the best out there. but Nvidia has been having issues as of late. Nvidia has been having driver issues. the overall boost that will happen on Vulkan (OpenGL) and DX12 is questionable. also Nvidia tends to phase out their graphics cards. what i mean by that is, next year they'll release Pascal. and then out of nowhere the older GPUs start acting up in performance. (of course this is all theory and speculation.. Nvidia denies it. but this has happened with the 700 series overall). also the reason i threw that in there is because because the Fury has HBM it's an excellent performer for high res gaming. PLUS the 1440p monitor has adaptive sync. which will sync the frame-rate thrown out by the graphics card to the refresh rate of the monitor. what this does it gives a perfectly smooth experience with no tearing or frame-skipping. Nvidia's G-Sync offering is almost 300 dollars more than the equivalent Adaptive sync monitor. but the difference between them is Adaptive sync is a standard. G-Sync isn't. some time in the future G-sync could go away and you'll be stuck with a monitor that only works for Nvidia. Adaptive sync works for Intel and AMD.
As for the keyboard. eh i can't argue. i'm just speaking with my experience with corsair keyboards. in fact i'm still using it now with it's 6 dead LEDs. but if he wants the K95 by all means go for it.
As for the 144 refresh rate. well the games depending how he fiddles with the settings. his frame-rates on ultra will be in the high 60s to mid 70s. but if he fiddles with the AA and textures he can reach around 90 to 100 frames if he wanted. and he will never have to deal with tearing since the refresh-rate of the monitor is high.
@Kat Ok I see the benefits in your motherboard and I was going to switch over to it but I saw it was incompatible with the i7 (he's the type of person who likes to click the play button and everything works so I don't really think he's every going to get too tech savvy so an overclocked i5 is out of the picture) since I don't know much about motherboard do you know of any with your fancy features that has i7 support while not being too expensive?
I've combined aspects of your build and my build together and here is what I got. Sorry if I kept a number of your suggestions out but I'm trying to make the PC look nice as well (hence the nice case) plus its hard to make large changes when there's so much of my friend's money in my hands. If you can justify a few of the changes I'll talk to my friend about it and implement them. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
@Streetguru There is plenty of case space the size problem was about the monitor.
When I said that he's not going to upgrade his PC in the future I meant that when I asked,
You replied
But the thing is this will be it, he doesn't have the most time for gaming and just wants to sit down to a thing that works without having to maintenance it and upgrade it so future upgrading is out of the picture for him.
I'm my opinion unless you monitor is over 30inches there isn't much point in using a screen above 1440p. You wouldn't see much of a difference at that size in games and you would just be wasting power trying to drive the 4K. Also for 4K 60fps on ultra now and into the future you would probably need two 980tis.
About the PC though, your new route certainly is a lot better but I have a few critiques and questions.
The i7-4790 and i5-6600k is around the same price, so why the i5?
What is so good about the motherboard you've picked (I don't know much about motherboards)?
The SLI looks sexy but my experience with SLI is if a game is not optimized then SLI is just slow and if a game is optimized then SLI is not required and a single card would've done just fine. Is this a real thing or did my last SLI experience leave a bad taste in my mouth?
The case is the one thing I really don't like since it's not that great for our situation; I've built a few PCs but I hate tight spaces, case space is not a problem so it can be big, and it seems like airflow hell in it with the GPUs.
Finally you picked the MG279Q which was actually being considered by us, however @Kat picked the "Acer XG270HU". While the money is certainly there for your more expensive choice, what are the benefits of yours, they seems the same?
@kevindavid3 Sorry if I sound ignorant, but wouldn't the higher resolution if anything be more noticeable on a smaller screen size? Since you have more pixels in a smaller space?
Though we have given up the idea that we can do 4k and have decided to do 1440p 144hz(maybe next build)
Technically yes there would be improvement of 4K over 1440p at that size. But let's take 27inches as an example. At 1440p at that size you already can't see pixels on the screen sitting at a normal distance. 4K would be the same, can't see the pixels. So for that size it doesn't seem very practice going 4K if 1440p already does a great job at it. But when you take a 40inch screen for example, if that was at 1440p you would see pixels, but at 4K no. So in the long sense 4K is really only practical when using larger screens.
The motherboard just has 2 PCI-e slots at x8 x8, so it's better for multi GPU configs.
Most of the AAA titles have support for dual GPUs now
The Case is just pure joy to work with, but it's just my personal preference, the video has the older model, the newer one just has added 3.5" hard drive bays, basically you can completely tear the thing down to work in it, plus you can hot swap hard drives making it easily expandable.
If you get it just get a 200mm fan to mount on the top slot to blow some air over everything inside.
Otherwise the monitor I included compared to that one is IPS, so it has better colors and viewing angles, I wouldn't buy any display that isn't IPS these days