I'm looking at getting a new desktop via a company that lets you select the parts, but then assembles and tests it for you before shipping. 'Build your own computer without having to build your own computer'. Customising a base model, there's a lot of bewildering choices, though. Not being all that technologically literate, I'm interested in some more informed opinions on a few things.
Firstly, I'm ideally wanting something that allow me to play games on very high/ultra settings over the next few years on a single 24 inch monitor. But I don't actually play games nearly enough to justify the top price range, so I need to hit the right trade-off between high end graphics and expense. From what I can tell, this probably means something like the R9 290X or GTX 780, which are around the $450 mark. The choices don't seem to be that simple, though, because there are a number of options at that price range, and I don't know the difference between them. For instance, a GTX 970 is only about $30 more, and the R9 290 cards seem to be offered a very different ways, all within $60 of each other:
- MSI R9290-GAMING-4G R9 290 Gaming 4GB DDR5 384-bit, 2xDVI, HDMI, DisplayPort = $415
- Gigabyte R9290C-4GD R9 290OC 4GB GDDR5 512-bit, 2xDVI, HDMI, DisplayPort = $439
- Gigabyte R929XOC-4GD R9 290X DDR5 512-bit, 2xDVI, HDMI, DisplayPort = $479
From my perspective, the addition of a G and extra bits in the second one would seem to suggest that it's probably a better deal, but I don't know whether that's actually true. I'm guessing my theory of rising prices providing proportionally more utility isn't going to hold, in any case. So, any advice on what to get within this range, or on selecting a graphics card more generally?
Secondly, there's the CPU, which on the build I'm looking at is an i7 4790 3.60GHz 8MB Cache LGA 1150 CPU ($413). One option that caught my eye was one that appears to be the same except for being 4GHz and $459. I'm not sure if there's any actual practical difference between the two, at least enough of one to justify an extra $46.
Thirdly, there's the memory, which comes in all sorts of different configurations, it seems, with the major difference within the same brand again appearing to be in MHz, going from 1600MHz to 1866MHz on 16GB DDR3 adding about $30. Then there's also the option of going up to DDR4 if I'm willing to double the price. Is the difference so significant as to warrant about $400 instead of $200?
All the other options have various choices which I can't really distinguish in any meaningful sense too (e.g. why is one SSD 50% dearer when it's only got 8GB more space?), but I think the above three are the main ones. I guess another problem which I want to avoid is bottlenecks - getting the best graphics card and memory might be pretty useless if the CPU is a bottleneck, for instance. So any advice on where I might be hitting such a bottleneck, or how I can avoid one?