I see, he has found a 3960x for around £180 used, the 4790k though pretty much has to be new thus costing ~ £270. His logic then would be to get a X79 motherboard and 2 r920x cards which I'm guessing are the next most expensive things. In the future could he not upgrade to the haswell-e or ivy bridge-e chips? Or would he need a new motherboard. (I'm an AMD guy mostly don't know much about Intel's compatibility) also I'm trying to convince him to go 1150 so things might change
2011 and 2011-3 aren't compatible. So he would have to get a new mobo, new processor and even new ram (DDR3 vs DDR4). Also does he really need 2 GPUs? The R9 290X comes at around 270 punds, give or take a few quid. Rumor has it the new 390(X) will be 8GB and priced around the same. Though that's just a rumor. We'll see on the 16th at E3