Urgent Gaming rig to run Crysis on 30" Ultrasharp 1500$ Budget this weekend

While I'm not going to sit here and build your computer for you, I will offer a couple of thoughts...

You mention that people say an i5 is just as good as an i7, but in applications that hyperthreading, the main difference between an i5 and i7, can be properly benefitted from, an i5 is not the same. It depends entirely on usage.

The inconsistency of the 290x cards comes from people nerfing the card's ability to cool itself by running it with the BIOS set in the position that is specifically designed to sacrifice speed to prevent the fan from spinning faster and creating more noise. The cards are perfectly capable of consistency when used as designed. The only legitimate complaint is noise (which is arguable,) otherwise, when not nerfed, they can compete with the 780ti series.

There's not a huge amount of point me suggesting keyboards or mice, partly because I'm no good at it, and partly because it's really subjective. Left enough cash on the table though.

The PSU requirements are a bit vague. If you want to cover future SLI, then obviously it needs to be quite a lot bigger.
I included a PSU that should cover GTX780Ti SLI.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($224.98 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: ASRock Z87 Extreme4 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($117.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ares Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($52.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($99.93 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($59.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB Video Card ($699.99 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: XFX ProSeries 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($132.98 @ Newegg)
Total: $1388.84
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-12-07 07:32 EST-0500)

Custom R9 290X should be coming fairly soon, but that is probably of no use to you given the timescale.

Haswell Vs Ivy Bridge is pretty much a non argument. Haswell is marginally faster and usually a bit more expensive. There isn't really a bad answer.
There isn't really such a thing as a mid range i7. If you go Haswell you basically have two choices- 4770 and 4770K.
If you are overclocking you need the K, otherwise get the 4770 (unless the prices are really close).


Really doesn't matter at this point. It's just a different box. All the cards are basically the same.




Yeah it seems like AMD made a bit of a mess of it, shame really as it looks to have potential.

If you wanted to upgrade to an i7 then it's just a case of dropping in a 4770K, everything else works just the same. If the extra $100 was a problem, then you could find it in a few places-
Drop the SSD.
Drop to a GTX780 from the GTX780Ti
Cut a bit of cash on the motherboard (not hugely advised if you want to overclock)
Drop the PSU to a single graphics card capable wattage instead of covering for SLI.

Yeah for sure, with some caveats.
Games are very scalar, so "maxed out" to one person doesn't always mean the same thing as to another. BF4, as an example, has a high detail option which artificially doubles your resolution, and cripples pretty much every graphics card. Almost nobody will use this, and almost nobody will include that as a standard "maxed out" setting, but you can see that it produces it a pretty big grey area. For any sensible application though, a single GTX780Ti or R9 290X will destroy games at 2560 x 1600.

Sorry I didn't get back sooner. Was working all day. On the plus side, I think I agree with just about everything Rammy has suggested. I would only disagree about who made the mess with the R9 290x rollout. The "quiet" mode was always intended as a compromise of speed VS performance. That is why there is an "uber" mode as well, which allows the card to run at full performance without hindrance. It's sites like Tom's and a few others that made a big quack about how "silent" mode should have worked the way the reviewers expected, which is asinine. If quiet mode had no compromises, the card wouldn't have two modes. Nobody would pick a louder of two settings, if all other things were equal. It was essentially a few review sites bad mouthing AMD, and the unfortunate consequences are evident in how many think the R9 290 and 290x cards don't work right with stock coolers. They work just as they were designed to.

Yeah my comments about the 290X rollout being a bit messy were just in reference to it presumably being rushed, hence the lack of availability of 3rd party cards.

Aside from that, I would still have a few reservations about the 290/290X right now. I know at the top end you pay a massive premium for minimal gains, but the 290 and 290X lack definition. People are selling modded R9 290s which perform as 290Xs for a lot cheaper, and there wasn't much difference to start with.
As for the cooler, I think AMD probably do need to raise their game, given how effective and (depressingly, more importantly) pretty the Titan cooler is. For a product at those kind of prices, it does seem a little on the cheap side.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed because competition is good, and the pricing on those cards makes them really interesting. It seems like they were very close to an absolute killer and just missed. I remain very interested to see what driver and manufacturer solutions do with them though.

Well, I have a situation where the computers live in another room, so there would be absolutely nothing to gain from modding or aftermarket coolers except for overclocking headroom. As it stands, I would neither feel any heat the card produced nor hear the noise, so the cheaper OEM solution is actually my preference to any extra cost a 3rd party cooler might add.

Personally, I think instead of going on the defensive, AMD should have withdrawn their sample cards from review sites like Tom's that chose to bash them. This is what gave teeth to the argument that throttling and inconsistency plagued the cards. The inconsistency is from the normal inconsistency of manufacturing, and the throttling is from the quiet mode. This is normal and to be expected, and the reviewers convincing some folks there shouldn't have been any performance compromise in silent mode is just foolishness.

I agree that Titan's cooler is much more elegant, and there's plenty AMD could do in that regard, but what would the cost have been to the launched product? Probably not a $550 card then. Also, I feel as a whole, computer cooling needs advancements in efficiency. The biggest issue is the small area in which these cards are expected to perform their cooling.

Very eloquently put, I agree with pretty much everything.

I think reviews are subjective and have to be taken as such. The issue is the manner in which reviewers state their results and subsequently what people chose to do with that information. People like a one sentence (or even a one word) review, and so can ignore a lot of the vital information which leads to a conclusion, however valid. My takeway from the Toms review (as well as most of the others) is that there is massive potential in these cards, but there are some not insignificant stumbling blocks.

I don't think AMD do themselves too many favours mind you. Aside from PR, I think the decision to run what is effectively a "target" clock speed is pretty misleading, when you compare it to Nvidias Base+Boost terminology.
On the majority of graphics cards, the main side effect of running a low fan speed is an increase in temperatures, not a significant performance dropoff, so I do think it's something that needs to be addressed. It's quite possible that in a couple of months time we'll all be saying what a great card the 290 is (at this point, I doubt the 290X will ever make that distinction) due to improvements in production standards on the reference cards as well as custom solutions and driver updates.

The cost issue I feel is a bit of a non starter. Non reference cards are usually fractionally more expensive than their reference rivals, and it's pretty easy to justify that cost offset. The profit margins on cards of this nature are astronomical, to use the previous Nvidia generation as an example, the GTX680, GTX670 and GTX660Ti all used effectively the same silicon. The reference 680, 670, 660ti and 660 all used roughly the same cooler. Now I'm not pretending that it cost the same to make a 660 as it did a 680, but a lot of the costs across those types would be shared despite the huge variance in price points. Cutting into that profit margin a little to provide more of a cost-proportional spend is not going to appeal hugely to the penny pinchers, but these high end cards are more about brand prestige than market share.

Also, how massively offtopic have we gone?

Off topic, or exploring the finer points of a particular aspect of the original poster's topic!