Looking to build Gaming PC

[agui]

Hello guys,

First off, I just want to say that this is an amazing website and i'm glad I found it! Secondly, I am looking to build a gaming desktop this summer. I need a monitor and a keyboard/mouse for it as well. I have been messing around with pcpartpicker and have created some builds but I wanted to see what YOU would do in my situation.

My budget is $1000, I don't want to go over, and I would like to stick with an i5 and put more money in a graphics card.

So, what say you forum?

 

[agui]

Anyone?

 

[ssddx]

realize you posted in opinions and experiences which doesnt get as much traffic. the systems new build area is where this should have been posted as it gets more traffic. we also do this in our free time so give us some time to respond.

clarification: $1000 for the tower, or total? if total then your actual budget would be about $950-980 for the tower.

agree, i5 is sufficient for gaming.

it would be benneficial to buy a higher end graphics card. due to your budget you may want to take one step down from the bleeding edge though.

8gb of name brand ram is more than sufficient.

buy a motherboard from a reputable company. i prefer asus, dfi, intel, gigabyte. you will want usb3.0, sata6, onboard sound and i would recommend a bios you can use for overclocking in the future as an option.

for a storage drive your budget may limit you to a normal hdd which is slower but i would suggest at minimum a ssd boot drive if you can fit it in your budget. the increase in system performance is very noticible. for a normal hdd i would recommend wd caviar black, seagate barracuda and samsung spinpoint f3. for ssd i would recommend intel 520, samsung 830 and 840 pro. of course you can go with other brands, these are just ones with enough feedback on here to be a no brainer. as far as sizes go for a boot i wouldnt go less than 80 but 120 would be preferred as they do fill up fast and filling them up too much limits their performance. i wouldnt go over 1.5tb in a normal hdd as i've heard of some issues with reliability and i'm not sure everything is fixed yet. could be but i've had 3 hdd failures, one within a week, and i'm not willing to take that risk myself.

as far as what you can expect from the system? for 1080p gaming you should be fine for most games you may play but you may not be able to run max in such games as crysis 3 or metro 2033 as these are some of the most demanding titles out right now. look at the gpu charts to see performance numbers but i can tell you for crisis 3 you're looking at sli gtx680 if you want around 60fps on ultra.