So for my birthday I received slightly more than I had expected in terms of pc parts, Ram and Mobo. Because of this i have a left over £200 and can't decide what to spend it on. So here are my options
- 780 ti (instead of the 780)
- Ikea galant corner desk
- An I7 4770k (instead of the i5)
- A headset / headphones as I've only got some uncomfortable Sony's or my monitor at the moment
- Or save up for a 1440p monitor
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/2KNv6 My build as it stands so far (already have the OS, RAM and MoBo)
What is the system designed for?
High end gaming (planning on heavily modding skyrim)
Streaming and some light editing.
Personally I would increase the volume of that hard drive to 2 or 3tb.
Trust me when I say you WILL eventually be wishing you had a bigger hard drive, regardless of your space consumption predictions. It's the difference between doing things like keeping all these movies on your hard drive and all these games installed or having to remove some of them.
Though that still leaves plenty of money. Upgrading the CPU is a bad idea because you gain almost no benefits from the i7 for your uses.
This leaves you two good options. Either the 780 Ti or some headphones and a mic.
The benefits of the 780Ti would be of course increased performance. Over 1TFLOP of extra raw processing power. The ability to SLI with a more powerful card in the future when they are cheaper.
You could also get yourself some good low-mid range headphones. If all you are doing is video games then this set right here is the king of audio positioning in its price range and just about the most popular set of headphones for video games
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-Audio-Technica-ATH-AD700X-Open-Air-Dynamic-Headphones-from-Japan-/151213491122?pt=US_Headphones&hash=item233506c3b2
Of course there are other options out there in the same price range
Then you can add on a mic. Zalman makes fantastic mics for the price they cost, this being their best seller:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zalman-ZM-MIC1-ZMMIC1-Lapel-Microphone/dp/B00029MTMQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391187729&sr=8-1&keywords=zalman+mic
Or you could opt for a more expensive Antlion Modmic that turns your headphones into a headset, but better.
http://www.modmic.com/
They have a video on the home page you can watch to see how exactly it works. It attaches to your headphones like if it were a headset.
Your build its pretty set except i personally would add 2Tb HDD just for media and a 3TB to act as a backup but thats just me. I have 3 HDDs in my system
Forgot to mention that I have a blue snowball mic. My main thinking behind the 780ti is everything else i can buy later but it will cost me more to upgrade from the 780 to the ti in the future. I do have an external 1tb HDD for other files so i think my storage will do for now.
But really how much difference will the 780ti give me over the 780 when modding skyrim ?
Very little difference. At this point the CPU is the bottleneck because of all the mods/scripts running, and there is no upgrade that will make a significant difference. The only thing you can do at that point is replace it with an ivy bridge 3570k, get some massive water cooling solution, and overclock it to 5GHz. However, you probably don't want to do that, so there isn't much you can do to up your skyrim's performance at this point, once it's modded that is.
I strongly suggest rethinking the hard drive. It costs very little extra relative to the other upgrades you are thinking of doing, so you could easily do that in addition to another upgrade.
Hmm well I can do a 2TB segate baracuda as well as a 780 ti fine. However I'm now pushing more to the side that a 780 will be enough and instead I'll probably buy some headphones with the left over money. I think it was just an issue of wanting the best but maybe i don't need it.