Seeking advice on a PC Build

What resolution would you want to play at? I know budget isn't important right now, but it's also a major consideration too. Generally speaking though, a sufficiently clocked i5 (even going as far back as the i5 2500k) will not hamper your gaming experience in the least. An i7 is not necessarily at all unless you plan to do other things with the PC.

As for AMD/Nvidia, the RX 480 from AMD is midrange cards, whereas NVidia's equivalent is the GTX 1060. Nvidia currently have the higher end GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, whereas AMD have yet to release their equivalents. It's hard to imagine that the RX 480/GTX 1060 would be seriously challenged on high (not max/ultra) settings at 1080p for the next year or two. But going for the GTX 1070 now that the price is a bit lower isn't a bad idea either if you want the option to move to 1440p gaming, or 60+Hz 1080p gaming. With some luck, you could also score a deal on end of life last gen cards that will carry you for longer than the current midrange crop. Look for prices and sales on the likes of the R9 Fury/R9 Fury X/R9 Nano, and the GTX 980 Ti.

A few months ago, I scored an R9 Nano for the same price as a GTX 1060, despite it performing up to 30% faster in the resolution I'm using it for. So yeah, it's vitally important to know your desired resolution and budget.

As for AMD CPUs, they aren't slated to come out until next year. So if you're planning on buying soon, I wouldn't really consider them. I suspect that IPC wise, they will be around the Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge level. Meaning that clock for clock, they will be around 15-20% slower than what Intel currently has out. That doesn't necessarily translate to 15-20% less gaming performance though. In fact in many cases, the difference is 5-10% at most. And then you overclock and the difference is gone altogether. Zen's advantage will come with the extra cores. As previously stated, a Sandy Bridge level CPU isn't going to bottleneck gaming systems anyway, but the extra cores will come in handy for productivity tasks like movie editing, rendering, streaming and the like. The thing is, because they'll share many features that the current Intel platforms have (USB 3.1, DDR4 Memory, etc), then there's no point taking AMD's upcoming Zen CPUs into consideration until they actually come out. They probably won't be as good as Intel's CPUs for gaming, but won't hold you back to any significant degree either. You won't notice the difference in playability. And since you are looking specifically for gaming performance, the only relevance for AMD Zen is price for performance ratio for the platform. Which isn't something we'll know until closer to release.

G-Sync seems to technically be the better solution of the two, providing smoother response at lower framerates (below 60fps). This is, though, going to be a very subjective issue that depends on what you play, how you play, what your hardware is capable of and if smoothness issues will bother you.

That kind of choice comes at a huge price premium, as G-Sync monitors are quite expensive compared to Freesync alternatives. Your budget is quite high, but how much you can spend on a monitor depends on how much you spend on everything else.

1440p gaming is not too demanding on the latest hardware, and you can get by for a few years with a current gen Core i5 and a GTX 1070 easily. As crusty said we will have to wait for AMD's high end to have the full picture. There are plenty of rumors and some hype, but we should wait and see. The RX480 was made out to be a GTX 1080 killer and it turned out to be not even close, but a RX490 might compete with the GTX 1070 and provide really good 1440p performance at a lower price point (if by that time nVidia hasn't slashed prices in preparation for Volta).

If you can wait until Christmas, I strongly suggest that. We will probably hear more from AMD and you will certainly be able to get better prices during sales.

Maybe 1060 is good enough...



I knew for my 20" 1600*900 monitor, GTX 760 is more than enough!

www.logicalincrements.com is a great starting point. Check out their guides and their various build suggestions.
Aside from covering a variety in budgets, they also often use local prices and dealers. And everything in their builds is compatible so you don't end up with ram too tall for your heatsink's clearance etc.

DX12 will have higher adoption than Vulkan but both will give AMD large advantages over Nvidia relatively speaking. As for AMD Zen and Vega, worry about those when they come out. You could literally pop in a second hand Intel 2600k from 2011 and a second hand R9 290x from 2013, give both a light OC and be okay for most games 1080p 60 fps high to ultra settings right now.