In January of 2014, I took a leap of faith by driving to my local Fry's and buying my first rig, without doing any prior research. I was a console gamer at large but after seeing that one video of the guy talking about his seemingly (what we superior species now see as everyday life) livid experience joining the PC community. ( http://youtu.be/GxpJ52WTp2Y )Prior to that I'd also been messing around on my dad's desktop playing some free2play titles and generally vibing out to the whole PC scene. Skip to the buying process, my dad works for intel. Because of this, he gets some pretty hardcore discounts on intel CPUs and other things of intel origin, so this only furthered my interest in this realm of gaming.
We enter this emporium of PC gaming magic in Fry's electronics and I talk to the nearest salesman. I don't really feel like breaking a bunch of PC parts trying to shove an HDMI in to a PCI Express port like the idiot I was so I decided to buy a prebuilt PC for $950. It was a Lenovo K450, modified. Big mistake there, but at the time a GTX 650 and an i7-4470K bundled with a corsair KB and 1440p monitor + 16gb of corsair ram and some free games from AMD (the salesman was a bro and gave me some codes) - I've been gaming on it for almost two years now, and the old 650 is getting frail; showing its age. I really want to buy a new case and a spiffy EVGA/PNY/ZOTEC/MSI card and a third monitor. I'm into flight simulators and fallout, skyrim and the likes, with the occasional game of ArmA 3. I saw some GTX 690s for sale for damn cheap to what they were about a year ago, and I will never really be a "gotta have the latest tech guy" so if it's last gen, I could care less. Give me some recommendations, guys.
TL;DR I wanna upgrade my prebuilt computer to be more "involved".
Some input from Logan and the gang would be nice too.
From the specs without knowing the PSU it seems that you only need to upgrade the GPU to get a better PC but if you want to do some crazy build like you see from time to time on r/pcmr knock yourself out. Although they builds that look cool as hell are cost a lot.
one of the main reasons not to buy a pre-built lenovo or dell or some such is the strange non standard minimum spec power supplies that make upgrading tricky.
They can have strange "what the hell is this?" wires that turn out to be for some possibly important feature or they could be wired weird so your pc explodes with a normal PSU
Moved from Santa Ana to Hazleton Pa about 16 years ago. Loved going to Fry's and PC Whorehouse in the 90's. How are you on open/box display models? Or refurb/factory recert stuff? I like Microcenter and They had an open box gtx 770 for 135 regularly 169. On your budget you could grab 2 and go dual graphics. They also have the gtx 960 for 179 which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever! 325 gives you a ton of options. Fry's id HUGE and they should have some display stuff deeply discounted. My first pre-built was an old 286 and I had no clue and wanted to play Doom. Went to frys looking for a 386 and got a 486 dx2 50 with MB dirt cheap 4 meg of ram and got it to work. I had a BLAST!!! Your Dad works at intel, he can probably help out allot:) I am sure Intel gives there employees discounts on computer stuff. I am a huge fan of AMD but in your case I would go nvidia.............like forever:)
upgrade with that 325 dollar a nvidia 970gtx they can be had for about 220 USD on ebay new. If your boot isn't SSD yet upgrade that next. Not sure if your mobo is compatible but I'll go with a 4770k and a high end cooling heatsink next, when you have more money.
Keep in mind most of the older nvidia cards aren't even directx 10 or 11 certifed.
Owned one, it was meh. The performance in games that don't support SLI is pretty abominable, and having to disable, then re-enable SLI every time you want to play one of those games requires the drivers to restart, which takes anywhere between 15 seconds and 2 minutes.
Beautiful card though. Best GPU design to date, aesthetically.
These are good. If you're comfortable with nVidia than a 970 isn't a bad card. Used cards are plentiful on Ebay, and cards like the GTX 780, 780 Ti, and original Titan are still decent enough despite taking some performance hits with more recent drivers.
And an SSD is a must have for any modern PC.
Not sure why you bring this up. You'd have to buy a 10 year old card to not have AT LEAST DX10, and a 5 year old card to not have DX11.
Okay well first ypur going to need a 5960X paired with an Extreme 11 board. You'll need 64gb of RAM, two 1tb M.2 drives, and 12 SSDs coupled with 4 R9 Fury Xs.
Well you seem good on the CPU and RAM side of things. SSD is a must. GPU also. Maybe PSU, depending on the wattage of your current one. If it is much lower than 450w, you may need to upgrade. All desktops deserve to be hard wired too, so if your system is not hard wired pick some Cat.6 cable up.