430$ graphics card?

[Alec10121]

yes any GTX 970 can handle 1080p gaming on ultra settings 60FPS in most modern games, and so does the R9 390/390X...as i said personally i would pick a GTX970 over an R9 390, but i would choose an R9 390X with a good cooling solution over any GTX970 because the R9 390X is significantly faster than the GTX970 and it outperform it in every games out there, but the R9 390 is trading blows with the GTX 970 depending on the game and driver optimization so to me those perform similar and nvidia has a better feature set and lower power consumption= lower heat output = less noise.

 

So as far as i'm concerned R9 390<GTX970<R9 390X

 

Others may have different opinions, which is fine too.

AMD tend to perform better as you increase the resolution though, so for 1440p i would be tempted by the R9 390...more VRAM and perform better at that resolution.

Heres the plan: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/xzNg7P My current laptop is an Alienware 17 and it has a Core i7 4710HQ @ 2.50GHz, and a GeForce GTX 970m. I understand that you may not be experienced in everything but it is very likely. Will the computer im planning to build surpass my laptop in performance? 

[Elfuego]

Heres the plan: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/xzNg7P My current laptop is an Alienware 17 and it has a Core i7 4710HQ @ 2.50GHz, and a GeForce GTX 970m. I understand that you may not be experienced in everything but it is very likely. Will the computer im planning to build surpass my laptop in performance? 

 

Looks fine; I cant see anything majorly wrong. Though I would personally swap the WD Blue for a WD Black (or two and put them in RAID1).

[Elfuego]

Defenetly, BUT...as someone else said: there might be some other VERY good reasons to still pick the GTX970 over an R9 390/390X

 

1- You might NOT want a card that will pull 300W from the wall and heat up your entire room in no time flat

2- You might NOT want a card that has very bad DX11 drivers requiring ton of CPU overhead.

3- You might NOT want a card that does not support gameworks, physX, shadowplay, DSR and VXGI and other cool technologies built into maxwell.

4- You might NOT want a card that is last gen technologies across the board.

5- You might NOT want a card that will take weeks before a driver update get released to fix problems and add CFX support to your latest favorite game.

 

All i'm saying, is that there are reasons why the cost to performance might be lower on team red, sometimes it's worth it to sacrifice a little bit on performance to have better features, better support and just a cooler/quiter card overall. (BTW i would still pick an R9 390X over a GTX 970...but probably not an R9 390)

 

 

For me gameworks (and maybe CUDA) is the only real issue. THe "CPU Overhead" is next to nothing on a "decent" CPU like an i5 or FX series.

 

Maybe heat if you live somewhere hot.

[Morgan MLGman]

@Alec10121
You can also consider this:

Obviously you can swap the 390 for the 970 depending on what do you prefer, my 970 is pretty good and eats anything I throw at it

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/CcJmTW

 

[i_build_nanosuits]

Heres the plan: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/xzNg7P My current laptop is an Alienware 17 and it has a Core i7 4710HQ @ 2.50GHz, and a GeForce GTX 970m. I understand that you may not be experienced in everything but it is very likely. Will the computer im planning to build surpass my laptop in performance? 

Defenetly, both the CPU and GPU are noticeably more powerful than your laptop specs, in fact the GTX 970 is noticeably faster than even the GTX980m.