I'm currently in a slow process of building my first computer and I have decided on spending about $1,500 and I've been purchasing my parts slowly when they are on sale. I currently have purchased, my case, which is a nzxt s340, a PSU of 750W RAM: Corsair Vengeance, and an i7 4790k. I still have in my wishlist is for mobo: asus z97 pro, x61. I have a 970 from gigabyte, but reading other peoples post others are saying that its worth getting something else and I would like to ask what should I get? I want to get the most of what I can.
@CounterfeitTacos
Grab a 290x. specifically the MSI Lightning edition. it's arguably the best 290x you can get ahold of, cause it's the one that has the lowest temps out of all the non-reference coolers. and if you are pushing 1440p or higher resolutions, you won't hit walls with the 290x, unlike the GTX 970 where even though it's advertised as 4GBs of memory, most games will use the 3.5GB at most. if the game pushes more memory, the performance overall degrades and the frame-rates start to drop. due to Nvidia pulling a fast one by having 3.5GB of Fast Memory and 500mb of Slow memory on the frame-buffer
Would this card last me a long time, when newer games come out, would I be able to play at 1440p? such as I want to play skyrim with high resolution textures. I was reading some reviews and they say that it performs less than the 970 and that it has a high power consumption than the 970.
Right now the 290x has amazing price to performance. If you are worried you can try and wait for the 300 series but you will still get more performance out of the 290x than you would on the 970 and with the msi lightning edition you can get a good overclock as well. I dont have either of these cards but from what I know the 290x should beat the 970 at 1440p Skyrim where that extra 0.5gb of memory will be quite useful
@CounterfeitTacos
The card will last you a long time, depending on how you choose to play your games. but for argument sake, yes it will last you a while. there are still people that run old 6970s or GTX 680s are satisfied with their gaming experience. There is no such thing as "Future-Proofing". Things get outdated all the time. for the most part you can run most games on high settings with a R9-290x at 1440p and have a reasonable experience. My version of skyrim i have 150+ mods i get exactly 60FPS at 1080p. if i play at 1440p and turn the filters to high i get around the high 40s.
And yes it has higher power-consumption than the 970, but that is really not an issue. GTX 970 vs an R9-290x, they perform just around the same, they beat each other in different games. the time that AMD cards truly show their muscle and price to performance value as well is when you put them in crossfire. When the R9-295x2 (R9-290x Dual GPU Card) released it destroyed everything on the market, even the Titan-Z (GTX Titan Dual GPU Card). at all benchmarks, 4K included.