Need help putting together a solid rig

First, be aware that NVidia has announced its new 1070 and 1080 video cards will become available in June. No benchmarks yet that I've seen, but the general expectation seems to be that the 1070 will be at least comparable to, and maybe better than, the current 980 Ti, for a substantially lower price. It may be worth your while to hold off buying until those benchmarks come out.

This first build assumes you don't want to wait, and that you choose currently available parts. I got the price down as far as I could while still including a GTX 980 Ti and a decent-sized SSD. You could save a bit by choosing a smaller SSD or no SSD; or, (by going a bit further over budget) you could get a larger SSD and no mechanical drive. Just depends on how much storage and installation space you feel you need, and how important fast boot, load and save times are to you.

Note that neither of these builds is overclockable. With this first build, if you want an unlocked k processor and a motherboard that supports it, you may need to drop the SSD or choose a less powerful video card.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor ($204.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H170-GAMING 3 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($104.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ($37.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: A-Data Premier SP550 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($57.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($46.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Video Card ($559.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Thermaltake Versa H21 Window ATX Mid Tower Case ($44.83 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA GS 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($79.99 @ Amazon)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM (64-bit) ($85.99 @ Amazon)
Case Fan: Rosewill RFA-120-K 74.5 CFM 120mm Fan ($6.75 @ OutletPC)
Total: $1220.49
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-05-09 02:55 EDT-0400

(Price quoted above does not take into account Newegg's current $30 mail-in rebate on the video card.)


This second build assumes you wait until June or later and that you pick up a GTX 1070 model that costs about $20 more than the announced suggested retail price for the base model. I picked a comparably-priced 970 to stand in for the 1070, just to give an idea what the rest of the build could look like. ETA: Prices and availability can change quite a bit in that time frame, obviously, so this is just a general idea.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6600 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor ($224.89 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H170-GAMING 3 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($104.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ($37.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($149.89 @ OutletPC)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($46.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: Inno3D GeForce GTX 970 4GB HerculeZ X3 Air Boss Video Card ($399.00 @ Amazon)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case ($59.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA GS 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($79.99 @ Amazon)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM (64-bit) ($85.99 @ Amazon)
Case Fan: Rosewill RFA-120-K 74.5 CFM 120mm Fan ($6.75 @ OutletPC)
Total: $1196.46
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-05-09 03:01 EDT-0400

If you don't feel you need a 500GB SSD, you could swap it for a 250GB one and maybe add other niceties like an optical drive and a 2x8GB RAM kit instead of 2x4GB; or even an i5-6600k, aftermarket cooler, and a Z170 motherboard so you could overclock.