Gaming build for a friend. Wants to max out games with ease like battlefield 4. He also wants to do youtube videos.
i7 4770k. With the recent price cut it's a really good in my opinion. Even though it is overkill, this system will run strong for a while with this thing in. And who knows what direction games will take in terms of CPU usage.
16GB of Memory. RAM won't get any cheaper so i thought I would capitalize on a good deal. Plus more games will utilize more RAM, and battlefield 4 has proven to run better with more RAM.
SLI GTX 760, with the price cut on these, two of them are miles cheaper than a 780 and perform better. Sure there will be more noise, but my friend uses headsets anyway and the Fractal design case is a quiet case. And I know there will be more power requirement so that's why I put an a good Corsair PSU that will run these two plus overclock with ease. Also driver support for Sli is improving. But, I will have to just put up with the extra heat.
Get the i5-4670K which is just as good for gaming. No reason to spend more money for the i7-4770K
I doubt Battlefield 4 uses more than 8GB of memory, reason it is now is because of memory leak. No idea if they fixed it.
I would personally get a 780 instead of two 760s. The price difference isn't big enough to be bothered with the things that could go wrong with a SLI configuration.
Edit: and since it would be just one card you might save some money on the PSU.
I would personally get a 780 instead of two 760s. The price difference isn't big enough to be bothered with the things that could go wrong with a SLI configuration.
This.
While SLI and CrossFire are getting better support, there's still dropped and stunted frames among other problems with running dual card configurations. While they may have higher Average/Max FPS, they will be inconsistent performers when they are taxed and even sometimes when they are not. They have to communicate with each other and are only using 8 PCIe lanes each so the SLI technology itself is hamstringing the cards. You may see a high FPS number but have stutters and chop simply because the cards have a small miscommunication.
Tom's Hardware has some benchmarks where they include min/avg/and 95th percentile times between frames. What they consistently show is that with multi card configurations the 95th percentile wait times are consistently longer, meaning that there can be a noticeable hang time between two frames.
Also, You're more than doubling your chances for failures in the cards due to both defects and the excess heat you're pumping into your machine. Even if the cards don't fail, you may be shortening the life of all the components in the system due to heat degradation.
So, Go with the 780. It's still an absolute BEAST of a card and you can spend your money wisely on a lower power, but more efficient, PSU that will make your overclocks more stable and save you some money on electricity... or your friend rather.
Also, that PC Part picker is for and AMD Phenom build with a 6950. :P
In fact, I have that mobo in my very system with my Athlon II X4 and i can say that the particular Biostar Mobo you have there is utter shit. Power phase is weak as hell, only 1 PCIe lane, and limited fan headers. But most egregiously, they put the freaking 24pin Power plug all the way by the output shield!! I mean who the F*&^( does that? How am I supposed to have clean cable management and airflow when the largest cable in my machine is running across the entirety of my mobo and coming right to the backplate of my GPU!
Sorry, mini-rant about stupid design decisions that I didn't notice when I purchased that board.