ShadowHound96

I have an AsRock H97M Pro4 motherboard, and I'm having some concerns on what GPU can be physically placed into the motherboard. It looks like the heatsink and the 3.0 connection would interfere physically with the gpu if it was long enough, If I want to get a full sized gpu, would i need to get another board/get an itx sized gpu instead?

I'm having a bit of difficulty picking a gpu, I don't know if I should get a 380 or a 960, I have a crossfire ready board which means if I buy the 380 I could buy another down the line, but apparently a lot of people have told me crossfire is rubbish, also I myself wouldn't mind a 960, as I might not have to upgrade my PSU (corsair VS450) meaning I could save some money and get the gpu sooner. I'd really like some assistance as I'm relatively new to PC building and don't know much about AMD vs Nvidia, the rest of my build if it matters any; CPU-i5-4690 MOBO-AsRock H97M PRO4 RAM-Team Zeus Blue 2x4GB PSU-Currently a Corsair vs450 SSD-Kingston v300 series 120gb HDD-random 160gb from another comp GPU-Currently a gt730 Case-corsair spec-02

If you do a certain random encounter side mission, you can unlock Packie as a crew member, if you take him on a heist he'll talk about the bank job from GTA IV, and say he doesn't know if Niko is still alive.

gr8 b8 m8 i r8 8/8 no h8

yea, I'm not looking to overclock. Money is real tight + prices for parts is complete BS, in some cases over double what America pays (currently one AUD buys 0.77 USD), and the thought that doing so could shorten the lifespan of said component, I'd rather lower the settings of my games and save some money for a better component. So looks like i'll go with H97 until I want to go DDR4.

i did not expect so many replies in 50 minutes, just wow. I thank you good sir, for a while i had being trying to find a cheap z97 as i thought that the i3 - i7's could only run on that chipset if i couldn't do a bios upgrade. You have really helped me there This reply made me laugh for a bit, yea i think the card was made around 2009, not sure, but it works pretty well for the price ( i got it for free) i think it's like $60 here. i'll def put in another 4GB, but i remembering on a vid linus did on how ram may not work if it isn't from the same set of sticks you bought. I might look into that.

Currently the budget for my system is $600 AUD, just keep in mind that because of conversion parts here cost a bit more than in other countries. Anyway, I want to keep the price as cheap as possible but have good enough performance to last me a couple years, now I'm going to be using old parts from my current build to take a bit off the price but I plan on upgrading them in the months to come after the pc is built. The GPU though weak is powerful enough to run Skyrim and most games I have (I believe it may be OC'ed but not sure i got it off a friend). Here is the build: http://au.pcpartpicker.com/p/TGPG6h CPU: Intel Core i3-4160 3.6GHz Dual-Core Processor ($149.00 @ Centre Com) Motherboard: ASRock Z97 Anniversary ATX LGA1150 Motherboard EDIT: MSI H97M-G43 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($105.00 @ Centre Com) RAM: Kingston 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($47.00 @ IJK) Case: Silverstone Redline Series RL04B ATX Mid Tower Case ($49.00 @ Umart) Power Supply: Silverstone Strider Essential 500W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply ($55.00 @ IJK) Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 (32/64-bit) ($128.00) GPU: GeForce 8600GT inno3D 1GB (Purchased) HDD: 160GB HDD (Purchased) Total: $553.00 Now for reasons on picking the parts, I'll start with the obvious "why u using dat" parts HDD - it's a HDD i have and i want to use it now for a OS drive, once i have enough money i'll buy another (likely 500GB) HDD for Steam Library. GPU - just like the HDD it's a old part I'm reusing to keep price low, and once money is saved im planning on getting a 780ti CPU - really, i looked at videos showing this CPU to run Dying Light without OC so I chose it. Power supply - really no reasoning probably going to add a better one. RAM - im planing to upgrade to 2x4GB, but right now i'm hoping that's all i'll need for a while. But thinking of adding that to the initial list. Mobo - cheapest z97 mobo, that was compatible with the CPU. Case - cheapest case with front USB 3.0. Plus i like the look (call me childish, but I love the whole "transformer" look) and it does the job. OS - if win10 comes out before i buy the OS i'll buy it instead. and that's it, if you have any suggestions please let me know.