Egad

You have a LGA 1150 mobo and a 1151 CPU?  I hope for your sake that was a typo.

You have a LGA 1150 mobo and a 1151 CPU?  I hope for your sake that was a typo.

Make no mistake, Atoms have come a loooooooooooong way. They're not the trashy underbinned pieces of quartz that Asus' netbooks made them appear to be anymore. I have the Zenfone 2 and it's flipping awesome. Just wish the UI wasn't so crap... but the chipset is brilliant. Also, the phone makes a terrific handwarmer.
Wendell did a video on the ASRock BeeBox and that thing is pretty good for what it is.

Back plate.  
 
Or for the cheaper solution, mount it lower, buy a can of black plastidip, ask for extra chopsticks next time you order Asian takeout and cut them to size, then paint them. 

I wouldn't get a 690 with how badly Nvidia supports old SLI setups. the 690 is also incompatable with dx12, where as the 290 will be partially compatable.
 
That said I would buy the 690 to play around with, but the 290 to game.
 

It will be worse in some games because it won't use SLI, only a single core. At that point you have a gtx 680. Also as I said above the 690 isn't compatable with dx12. I would have bought one but for that. 
They are super cool to look at, but they are dated.

I care about power usage to the point I'll try to overvolt a 512 MB niVidia card to avoid running my HD, but I bought a FX CPU.
 
sigh
 
You're probably better coming at this from the other end and coming up a MSI Afterburner profile that undervolts and detunes your HD for your classic games.  Load that profile for games and load its normal profile for modern games.  Lots of bitcoiner miners would volt down down into .7 to .85 volts with clocks in 600 to 775 MHz range to save power and temp output.  

If anyone ever knew just how utter trash AMD's drivers are in Linux this wouldn't surprise them one bit. But they have come a long way from were they once were.

@fabiosapplou
 
Yes, setting aside 10 bit color that's correct.  Here on some benchmarks on the Maxwell higher end cards.  Depending on the specific task I might recommend the EVGA Titan X Hybrid, for the additional CUDA and RAM.  Otherwise a 980Ti either with a hybrid cooler or reference blower would be ideal.  The aftermarket fan coolers work well for gaming, but they dump the heat in the case.  On extremely long renders this can get problematic.  The reference blowers hit max temp faster but take much longer to heat up the entire case and potentially cause other components to throttle.  
 
For anything involving lots of double precision but less demand on the video RAM, namely solving complex equations, the 780Ti is still an attractive option given Kepler's double compute performance.  Memory performance and improved parallelism on the Maxwells, but Kepler GK110 also had dynamic parallelism support and those cards can offer a really good price to performance ratio for casual users.  

People are more likely to have some Windows only applications that place fairly intensive demands on the system (games, professional software, etc).  Even if you have good VM software, why deal with the hassle when a Windows key is under 100 dollars?  I enjoy CentOS, but I still mostly run it in VirtualBox on my second monitor.  I render using Windows only software and do my Ruby programming in a virtualized Linux.
 
We keep talking about moving the administrative staff to Linux because 99% of what they do only requires a decent Webkit browser.  However at the end of the day, one piece of accounting software that only has a Windows 32 Bit App and a scheduling piece of software block the move.  It's more cost effective to bulk buy prebuilt midtowers that come with Windows Pro and plop them down on desks than retrain people to use Linux and Virtual Box.  
 
It's an interesting situation.  On one hand with so many things moving into the browser (email, document editors, etc) we're less tied to the OS.  On the other hand with how easy it is to bring Linux up on VMWare, why bother to mess with anyone's boot OS.  

Pull the CMOS battery, give it a bath and it soak for anywhere from a couple hours to overnight, pull it out, remove any visible residue using a tissue and some alcohol.  Set it somewhere safe and let all the alcohol evaporate, stick CMOS battery back in and hope it works.
 
Although to be perfectly honest if I was paying you for a new PC, I'd expect my mobo never to have encountered energy drink.  If you can save it and use it yourself, that's cool, but my two cents is professional ethics dictate the customer get a new one or a price reduction.  

Microsoft also is not terribly active in revoking older MSDN keys.  They've always tolerated a certain amount of piracy on the grounds piracy still means market share.  I say this not to encourage such activity, but rather because lots of people have been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact Microsoft is not terribly active in cracking down on MSDN key abuse.  All it takes is one change in corporate policy, one engineer being told to hit the revoke switch, and lots of people would find their OS going poof.  

Pull the CMOS battery, give it a bath and it soak for anywhere from a couple hours to overnight, pull it out, remove any visible residue using a tissue and some alcohol.  Set it somewhere safe and let all the alcohol evaporate, stick CMOS battery back in and hope it works.
 
Although to be perfectly honest if I was paying you for a new PC, I'd expect my mobo never to have encountered energy drink.  If you can save it and use it yourself, that's cool, but my two cents is professional ethics dictate the customer get a new one or a price reduction.  

Pull the CMOS battery, give it a bath and it soak for anywhere from a couple hours to overnight, pull it out, remove any visible residue using a tissue and some alcohol.  Set it somewhere safe and let all the alcohol evaporate, stick CMOS battery back in and hope it works.
 
Although to be perfectly honest if I was paying you for a new PC, I'd expect my mobo never to have encountered energy drink.  If you can save it and use it yourself, that's cool, but my two cents is professional ethics dictate the customer get a new one or a price reduction.  

So, it's that one game. You said MOST games. Please look at the same channel and GTA V. i5 actually has more fps sometimes.

I still think people are overestimating how quickly DX12 becomes relevant.  As of Sept, 53% of Windows installs are still 7 and Win10's growth has mostly come from people on 8.1 going to 10.  Now obviously games/enthusiast types are more likely to upgrade and grandma is more like to still be on Windows 7, but that's still a big portion of the market booting to an OS that can't run DX12.  Give DX12's unity with the XBox, we'll see some Xbox/Windows 10 exclusives that use that, likely at Microsoft's behest, but for people not taking marching orders from Redmond, they still have tremendous incentive to perform well on DX11 or else bundle up Vulkan and work everywhere.  
 
Nothing is in its final form.  We're looking at cards not designed for DX12 running the first ever games programmed in DX12.  Sometime in 2017 we'll start to see the second wave of next gen video cards that look to have some serious life in them (al la 750Ti, etc), Intel will finally have to do more than incrementally bump its CPUs every so often and watch the AMD CPUs eat lead paint chips, etc.  
 
It's like everyone forgets the first DX11 games were kind of shit, since programmers were used to DX9 and there ended up being a number of high profile titles that took a couple patches and possible some video card driver updates to really see their full potential.  Someone's going to rush out a DX12 game and it will either fall flat on its face or else put some weird benchmarks.  Then everyone runs around screaming how this means something and totally misses the optimization patch the publisher pushes a month later that fixes everything.  

XP Pro Corporate and FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 is the way to go 

You don't even have to have a second email address if you don't want it with gmail.  You can just do your address+#@gmail.com.  For example egad@gmail.com and egad+1@gmail.com go to the same inbox.  But you can set a filter so whenever anything sent to egad+1@gmail.com comes in it is marked as read and stuck in a folder (or label as Gmail calls it) and never hits your inbox.  I just send it all to my trash where Google keeps it for 30 days and then purges it.
 
Still shitty of nVidia to want my email.  Although they already have my email and my Steam ID from back when I redeemed my game via them.  I assume they'll set up the emails to opt you in to their newsletter by default so they can pimp their new Netflix for Games thing.  

You can try:
 
Run the Windows Experience Index, for whatever reason this seems to trigger a refresh and sometimes fix it according to the internet.
Pull out half RAM DIMMs, boot the system, do some stuff.  Shut it down, put the RAM back in.  This should force Windows to reconsider how much it reserves.
 
Neither of those did anything for us, but on various forums people were swearing they worked for them.  

Separate email address for spam. Like a lot of people do. 

If battery life is a significant goal for the laptop, N3700, it's designed to be a low powered chip.  For general use and gaming the i3 is better, although the N3700 will be fine for nostalgia type gaming.  

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.

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.  

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.  

@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.