Dizzybird

I have a 1080p monitor that will become my second monitor and I plan on picking up a 1440 with no future plans to make the jump to 4k. I don't really have a budget. I don't have very many expenses so I've managed to get to a place where I can treat myself and I think it's fairly practical. Obviously I couldn't spend 10k on stuff, but could I spend $6k on a render farm and awesome 4k gaming rig? Yeah, and it would be awesome and I would probably make a lot of new friends in the area. Would I look back on it a year later and see it was way more than I was capable of using and wonder what I was thinking, yeah. I'm trying to find that right place between need and want. I am just a student and these programs help with that, the skills have also come in handy when interning, but most of the stuff I do is just on the side. As I do more and more I hate running into hardware or software constraints so I prefer something I can grow into without over reaching. You are right, for anything serious I would have access to a powerful machine and I would say this is a gaming first computer as I spend far more time gaming than anything else, probably somewhere around 75%.

Thanks, I never knew there were so many options out there. Each company making a handful of versions of the same thing, it's great if you know exactly what you want, daunting if you have no clue, thus my "everyone else bought it, so that must be what I should get" approach. I haven't really been rendering with my GPU, thus I didn't even think of that. My main factors up to this point in render times have been my CPU, thus the i7 over an i5, and the RAM, thus some overpriced slightly faster variant? that I kind of picked blindly. Seeing what the extra ram did for my render times on my laptop I didn't really want to skimp there but I am open to suggestions (I can't use that DDR4 ram that you have in your $2k build right?). Leaving the GPU not really making much of a difference in the rendering. Would it be a noticeable rendering performance difference from the 980 over the 970? Because if something takes 9 hours instead of 10 for example that wouldn't really be worth it to me but if it was twice as fast that would be a different story. I went with the two 970's because I didn't feel as though one would be enough and if I needed to boost the 980 in the future I would either have to buy another one, a massive jump that would probably be overkill, or start over with a new card, while with the two 970's I would have enough power to keep me happy for a while and if I needed more I could just throw a third one in there. This being my first personal power PC and being kind of new to things, I wasn't planning on overclocking out of the box. Really I'm just hoping I'll be able to put the thing together when it comes without causing some $1000 catastrophic failure. I just like the idea of being able to OC it in the future when I have a little more experience so I wont break it and can appreciate the extra power. As an added note, any suggestions on what I should do with my laptop, it'll be kind of useless after I build this, I don't really travel much anymore and when I do I try to disconnect as much as possible, seems like such a waste....

Well that's part of the problem, I can't exactly visualize the difference the extra money will make. I just simply don't have a grasp on it. [PCPartPicker part list] / [Price breakdown by merchant]( CPU | [intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor] $249.99 @ Micro Center CPU Cooler | [Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler] $29.98 @ OutletPC Motherboard | [Asus Z97-PRO ATX LGA1150 Motherboard] $152.99 @ Newegg Memory | [Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-2133 Memory] $189.99 @ Amazon Video Card | [Zotac GeForce GTX 970 4GB Video Card] $327.85 @ B&H Video Card | [Zotac GeForce GTX 970 4GB Video Card] $327.85 @ B&H Case | [Cooler Master HAF XB EVO ATX Desktop Case] $69.99 @ Newegg Power Supply | [seaSonic X Series 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply] $152.98 @ SuperBiiz Operating System | [Microsoft Windows 8.1 (OEM) (64-bit)] $89.98 @ OutletPC Total | Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available | $1591.60 Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-11-21 23:41 EST-0500 |

I have been a console gamer all my life and decided to make the switch to PC gaming about a year ago. I bought Lenovo Y580 (GTX 660m) and this satisfied me for a while but now I want more. I don't think I have the guts to tack on a e-GPU. So that leaves me with either building or buying a desktop. I've always liked shiny new things but I don't know where to draw the line. Is a $2000 system worth it or should I aim more for $1200, I have a build priced out at $1600 on pcpartpicker but I don't know if it's too much or too little. Right now I am playing on a single 1080p monitor but I kind of want a 1440 one. I understand it doesn't really make much sense to build a beast of a machine if you don't have the monitors to display it. I mainly don't want to end up in this situation again like I am with my laptop, a year later, wishing it was more powerful and not really able to do anything about it. Other than gaming I also do some stuff with Adobe and Autodesk products.

I just made the decision to make the switch to PC gaming from consoles and I can't seem to find any recent versions of one of my favorite games, Madden. They have Fifa and NBA 2K but no American football. Why is this and are there any alternatives that I don't know about?