Is it the right time build new Gaming PC?

It depends on you. Do you need/want a new pc?

It's hard to say. There hasn't been a game out there that really challenges the best hardware for a long, long time unless you want to be gaming at resolutions higher then 1920x1080.

PCI-E 3.0 is affordable, SATA6 and USB 3.0 are now more widely adopted and bluray players are relatively cheap. You can get a great GPU and CPU for cheap, DDR3 is very, very cheap, and SSD's are bombing in price.

So if you have an old PC that struggles to play DX9 games, then yes, you could get a new PC that hammers the crap out of most games for relatively cheap (~£700 depending on monitor/OS etc).

However if you want a "future proof" PC, I would wait to see what the demands of the next-gen engines are. UE4 sounds like it will be running on no less then a GTX680 which is expensive now, but in 2-3 years that'll be merely a GTX760Ti OC'd if future cards show the continued power improvement over the previous generations of cards, and such a card would be more affordable then a GTX680. Although if you can afford a rig with a GTX680 and 2x8GB 1600Mhz Ram, that will probably be relatively future proof if you make a system which has room for OC'ing and SLI in the future.

Hi

First off, if you are building a gaming PC then forget about socket 2011, it performs on par with 1155 for gaming at a fraction of the price. Plus there really isn't such a thing as future proofing, intel will be releasing a new socket for Haswell and AMD has pushed back the release of Steamroller to sometime in the future.

If you can wait until next summer (I know that's forever in the tech world) Haswell will be released and if rumors are correct it will be the last CPU type processor before everything becomes integrated into APU's (lame).

Also next spring AMD is releasing the new 8000 series GPU's which are said to use HALF of the wattage and provide almost double the performance (yeah well we can hope right)

If you were to build a system now you could build an i7 3770K with a $150 z77 motherboard and 8 GB Ram pair it with a HD7970 GHZ ED and a couple of SSD in RAID you really cannot get much faster than that.

Have Fun
Fungi

I'd have to disagree with what you say on future proofing.

Sure, 5, 10 years ago it was a mad idea, but considering the stagnation of gaming advances due to the limitations of their static hardware, and how PC hardware has left the consoles in the dust, I think it's more then reasonable to make a future proof/next-gen PC if you are smart about it.

We already know a fair amount about the desired specs of the next gen of consoles:

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/09/battlefield-3s-render...

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/stunning-vide...

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Kepler-Nvidia-Tim-Swee...

So if we take console optimisation into consideration, as well a power constraints, I think it's safe to say that the next-gen consoles (not the wii u - we know the specs of that are dire) will use about 4 - 8gb ram and I'm going to guess have the power of somewhere between a GTX560ti and 680 if we are lucky. Maybe they pull a trick out of their pocket and give us a GTX680 but that would be surprising to say the least.

So from the above, if you get yourself a motherboard that can take up to 32gb ram and SLI, has a CPU that won't bottleneck two GTX 680's and for the meantime just stick with one GTX 680, I fail to see how such a PC wouldn't be future proof while also not costing an extortionate amount.

If I'm not mistaken an OC'd 9950 with 7900 GT in SLI would still currently be better then both the 360 and PS3 if we consider the consoles gaming resolutions. Nowadays the power draw of the bigger cards is far beyond the power draw for consoles so if you go for a power hungry GTX680, I can't see how the next gen would/could supersede that GPU, let alone 2.

thanks guys for the advice, my usage will be gaming + photoshop + 3D design (maya, etc)

Gaming as in farmville or Metro 2033 on Max?