Egad

http://download.cnet.com/iSunshare-RAR-Password-Genius/3000-18501_4-76171250.html

You want to consider the 390 vs 970. You buy the 970 if: It's substantially cheaper either in direct price (ex you can afford a R9 380 or GTX 970 but 390s are more expensive where you live, then you buy the 970) or because you barely have any headroom with your PSU and going with the GTX 970 saves you the expense of a new PSU You have nVidia specific devices (Shield, G-Sync) or really like Shadowplay You have software (rendering, etc) that really benefits from CUDA Otherwise 390 all day.

So for CUDA, it all depends on the application in question. If the programmers did a good job, I'll see up to an 18% performance boost in run time with regard to the task. For applications where the programmers have not optimized to CUDA, less. This also applies in cases where the work being done simply can't be offloaded from your CPU onto your GPU (and then for that matter that your CPU can go do something else useful while the GPU does its thing). This is a useful little report on CUDA vs OpenCL, you can just jump to page 8 if you want to see some graphs. I would also not say 18% is the ceiling, that is just the number based on the applications I use. @SteveGrabowski0 might be able to expand on Matlab performance, etc. Otherwise ask within your department to whoever specs the systems. It might be worthwhile to ask around in your department and see how strongly people feel about CUDA being a must have for work. Either ask the person who specs the system or the prof who has a giant workstation shoved under a desk. If they went AMD and haven't felt any pain in their workflow, then CUDA isn't as worth it for you. For power supply, I'd hold in the 650 Watt range or even consider a 750 Watt one. What I am going to guess is if you find yourself using modelling applications that can distribute work across multiple GPUs, you'll be sticking a second GPU in the case. Maybe not right away, but once the price drops a little a second 970 might come along for the modeling and in game SLI. So at least consider leaving yourself room to power it. Matlab and a number of other applications have the ability to distribute the work across multiple GPUs and give you even better results. If you think during your studies you'll be crunching big stuff, consider it. 970s will be getting cheaper at the end of 2016 when next gen is out and the 970 is now considered last gen. I have a pair of 980Tis in my workstation. When I work from home I distribute tasks over them and then I SLI them for games. Works great. If you see yourself considering this route, leave yourself headroom with your power supply. Also as Steve mentioned you could get a B-Stock EVGA at an attractive price. When next gen comes you can stick in a better card, use that for gaming, and distribute workload across the GTX 970 and new card. Modelling software is much less picky about matching cards than gaming. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and EVGA all tend to make good cards. In your case I might consider the EVGA 970 blower cooler. The general NVidia reference design, although the GTX 970 specifically lacked a reference design, is blower style and pushes its hot air out of the back of the case (right out the vents by the monitor ports). Whereas the aftermarket designs such as the EVGA 970 ACX 2.0+ push air around inside the case and it is up to you to ensure your fans are venting it. Typically speaking on cards intended to chug away on long tasks the reference design is favored. You can't really overclock them much, if any, but they're also more immune to thermal throttling (where they get too hot and automatically reduce their clock). You don't need to worry about hot air staying in the case since the reference cards just push it right out the back. EVGA also has the best customer service rep of the bunch. If you want the aftermarket coolers they're all good, personally I'm not a fan of the Asus Strix 970, I think the Strix cooler is the worst of the aftermarket designs, but of course that means worst of a good bunch, still good. I'd go EVGA SSC ACX 2.0+ myself (that means somewhat pre overclocked and with the ACX 2.0+ cooler on it). You can then OC it some more.

Games are moving in the direction of expecting four cores or at least the ability to run 4 threads (i3). I don't think the Pentium is a good choice given where the market is headed. H97 and i3 or Z97 and i5 are both better choices. At this point the dual core Pentiums are something you have some fun with putting an overclock on and then pass on to someone who needs something just for basic productivity apps. Certain games already refuse to launch unless they see at least 2 cores/4 threads or 4 threads/4 cores. Others launch but sutter. If you go with the Pentium now, plan on buying an i5 soon.

If you got a really good deal on a GPU, then yes you could up your profit perhaps, but that is all based on getting a good price on a functional GPU. End of the day used hardware loses value quickly, especially entry level stuff, and like new doesn't mean that much.

@don_svetlio, well if his next post was how he has a G-Sync monitor, I was going to castigate him for dropping money on that instead of upgrading his rig first. If he is purely on about Adaptive Sync, a precursor to G-Sync/Free-Sync type things, then I was going to point what you said in terms of FPS being key, not the ability to sync your monitor up to them at this stage.

GeForce Experience: While nice, I've found it does not always deliver the optimal settings for my games. I've found it to be somewhat conservative and I can get more by tweaking my settings. Preferring one manufacturer over another for giving you a rough cheat sheet on in game settings is stupid. Now if you've bought in to the nVidia ecosystem via a Shield, G-Sync, etc then just say that and most folks will happily restrict their answers to nVidia products. Low information posts such as "ugh BRAND" are useless and frankly just waste the time of people trying to help you.

AMD CPUs have very poor price to performance right now. A cheaper Intel will crush the AMD on anything but heavily multithreaded workflows and typically if you have such a workflow it's worth it to consider an i7 or a couple of the Xeon offerings even if they cost slightly more.

Way too high. I can do this for ~450 with all new parts and I could cut it down to 400 or so fairly easily. 1 GB GPUs aren't worth much these days. I'd say 250 to 300 is what I'd pay. Whoever is buying your rig is likely on a budget and likely wants to have some money left over for a GPU upgrade. Yes yours has the OS on it, but that can be gotten via software swaps, etc. I suppose it being secondary market and all, list at 350-400 but be prepared to come down in price. At 600 I'm not even calling you, at 400, maybe. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Core i3-4150 3.5GHz Dual-Core Processor ($111.89 @ OutletPC) Motherboard: MSI H81M-P33 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($42.89 @ OutletPC) Memory: Mushkin ECO2 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($35.99 @ Newegg) Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($52.33 @ OutletPC) Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Superclocked Video Card ($126.99 @ NCIX US) Case: Apex SK-393-C ATX Mid Tower Case ($26.21 @ NCIX US) Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($64.99 @ NCIX US) Total: $461.29 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-10-13 14:40 EDT-0400

980Ti, two 970s delivers better performance than one 980Ti when there is good SLI support, but when there is not good SLI support, single more powerful card always wins.

If you want to do this right, you have to more in depth information the build. Specifically the socket of the CPU and as much info about the motherboard as possible. Celeron is just a brand name. For example if you have a motherboard with a LGA775 socket that supports the Core 2, you can reuse the board and have more money for RAM or the discrete GPU. Otherwise as other builders have shown you're looking at having to eat up a decent portion of your budget purely on the mobo.

If they're doing that compact of form factors, part of me worries they'll be styled after gaming laptops, where only a subsection of parts are upgradable and others are soldered in place or custom to the point your only option is to pay MSI a premium for an upgrade pack.

What is your friend's current rig...

Build is over a year old and not the best design if you want to do this now. I'd suggest spending some time in the New Builds and Planning Forum, they have some helpful stickies.

This was a pretty disappointing test to be honest. I would have loved to see both chips dialed in with the same clock speed and then run head to head so we could see exactly how much Skylake's IPC increase adds. Especially on benchmarks like Attila Total War, where we know the game will make use of extra cores. So then we'd get to see exactly where we are in terms of displacement vs IPC with the current processors. Also running K chips at stock clocks is somewhat pointless. Intel sells them all with with clocks on the more conservative side so that almost all of them overclock and Intel can avoid any customers feeling angry over losing the Silicon Lottery. Almost everyone gets a moderate overclock and thus very few folks get mad at Intel for getting a bum chip. The X series chips are especially prone to underrating themselves and then putting out massive overclocks so their owners can walk around feeling like OCing demigods. Linus himself touched on it 11 months ago discussing the 5820K as the best bang for the buck and one of better OCing options. So basically you end up with the battle of chips whose clocks were partly set by Intel's marketing teams to avoid any pissing and moaning to customer support.

Case might be an Alienware (given the little Alien head and general vibe of it). Personally I'd save to put money into the video card, save that 150 up to 300 and get a R9 390 GPU.

Yes, but you're not really going to use the extra threads in gaming right now. Keep the cash in your pocket and upgrade later. 6700 prices will only drop as additional CPUs come out. Or as Nena said you might want to jump right to a Cannonlake depending on what Intel offers. The current Skylake CPUs are really only our first sniff of the new stuff, no reason to go all in on the appetizers they're currently tossing over the walls.

I don't think the K is really safer. I'd say the general rule for overclocking is it improves your experience within a range. Like it makes a good experience better, but it can't make a shitty experience great. Unless you really win the silicon lottery and get a beast. Given the R9 is pricier, I'd save money now and go 6500 and 970. The reality is right now Windows 10 is primarily gaining market share at the expense of Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 is holding stable at 50% of the market. So this means developers are going to either need to produce games that run well on DX11 for quite some time and the GTX 970 is a strong DX11 card. They can't just go all in on DX12 at this point, unless MS pays them off to make a DX12 showpiece.

@Sauron Also more expensive than a Core 2 Quad Core! I mean come on, it has four cores, I'll be fine for gaming...

It's okay, but you want to get an i5 if you can afford it, or upgrade to one when you can.

R9 390 for the video card, additional VRAM and better context switching is a better bet right now if your goal is 3 to 4 years of gaming with reasonable performance. Do you plan on a significant overclock? If yes, buy the 6600K, if no, buy the 6500.

No practical reason aside from the aforementioned performance boosts, you have fun with RAM Disks and things like that though. Make your Max Weber, Mayer Zald, etc load faster. Or if you're like Jason Owen-Smith or Xu Yie and doing quant work with large datasets you might see a gain. SPSS is pretty memory efficiently, but lots of the modeling programs are not so great.

Just download VirtualBox, a free VM, and play around with with various distros on it. I'm partial to CentOS. You can try things out on that without having to actually fully buy in. Although really stick at 8.1 or jump to 10. I wouldn't change OS just over some new mechanical drives.

Also your current power supply matters for this in terms of how much power it has on hand to drive the card.

EVGA has great customer service. MSI, EVGA, Asus, and Gigabyte all deliver good cards. I'm partial to EVGA due to my positive experiences with their customer service, but it isn't as if the other options are worse.