Hey ma peeps,

I've gotten out of touch with the tech industry again so I figured I'd come back here and ask for some protips. Except this time I'm going to do it in the form of buying a fantasy computer:

If you had a $5000 newegg giftcard, what would your PC build look like (including monitor, speakers, periphereals etc)? Or would you save that giftcard for a few months for a particular release and make a build then? I hear the first DDR4 support is coming out sometime this year on Haswell-E, maybe that's worth it? Or would you say fuck it, the best build today isn't worth the expense compared to the best build from yesterday so I'm gonna trade in that giftcard for $5000 in chocolate donuts?

I would wait for the geforce 800 series to come out.

From past experience I assume next gen pc tech won't be groundbreaking. Advances are pretty slow now. When you needed a new computer every 2 years, 10-20 years ago you need a new one every 5-8 years now.
Look at Sandy Bridge, for example. It's over 3 years old now and barely slower than Haswell.
What they're improving (significantly!) is power demand.

Graphics cards are a different story because of parallelization which can theoretically be scaled up indefinitely.

SSDs are apparently also hit a point where advances also stagnate and become pretty minor. But it's newer tech so it's not as visible.

RAM I'm not sure about. I've heard about DDR4 but I'm not interested if it is indeed that much faster than DDR3 because RAM speed isn't the bottleneck, so improvements there will improve system performance insignificantly.

What I am interested in is 5G mobile networks. It has the potential to become the only wireless PAN/LAN network technology we need and make everything better and faster. As such the boundaries of workstation computer and tablet will deteriorate further, but I guess that's a bit far into the future for the scope of your question.

In summary: Just buy whatever. Make sure you get quality. Speed doesn't matter that much anymore. Get a $1000 - $1500 PC buy 2x 27" badass IPS monitors and spend the rest of your money for a donut plan at your favorite donut stall.

Generic 5000$ overkill build coming right up!

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i7-4960X Extreme Edition 3.6GHz 6-Core Processor ($1107.07 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H105 73.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($117.68 @ Amazon)
Thermal Compound: Prolimatech PK-1 5g Thermal Paste ($10.64 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 ATX LGA2011 Motherboard ($256.78 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: Patriot Viper 3 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3-2133 Memory ($303.24 @ NCIX US)
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 500GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($276.00 @ B&H)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($149.00 @ B&H)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($149.00 @ B&H)
Video Card: Asus Radeon R9 290X 4GB Video Card ($641.98 @ Amazon)
Case: Corsair 900D ATX Full Tower Case ($338.90 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: SeaSonic Platinum 860W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($243.37 @ SuperBiiz)
Optical Drive: Asus BW-12B1ST/BLK/G/AS Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer ($84.99 @ Mwave)
Monitor: Asus PB278Q 27.0" Monitor ($549.99 @ B&H)
Sound Card: HT Omega Claro Halo XT 24-bit 192 KHz Sound Card ($267.48 @ Amazon)
Wireless Network Adapter: Asus PCE-AC68 802.11a/b/g/n/ac PCI-Express x1 Wi-Fi Adapter ($99.99 @ B&H)
Keyboard: Corsair Vengeance K70 Wired Gaming Keyboard ($139.08 @ Amazon)
Mouse: Logitech G500 Wired Laser Mouse ($71.62 @ SuperBiiz)
Speakers: Audioengine A5 100W 2ch Speakers ($352.03 @ Amazon)
Total: $5158.84
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-03-16 07:44 EDT-0400)

Why not Corsair memory?

That SSD isn't doing the rest of the build justice.
Go for a PCIe SSD: 240GB ASUS RAIDR Express PCIe SSD or 240GB OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 if you want to get serious.

Oh and one more thing, if you are going the SATA route (which imo PCI-E is too much for a $5k build since it's not the bottleneck), why not go Samsung Pro instead of Evo?

I don't know if I agree with you about SSDs Nude. I think the fact they're coming down in price is a pretty good sign they're making good progress. Newegg had a deal for a 500gb ssd for 226 last week. I almost bought it.

Nude wasn't saying an SSD shouldn't be bought in this build; he's saying the 840 EVO isn't the best SSD you can get (even though it's a pretty sweet drive), and with a budget of $5000, you'd probably want to aim higher. PCIe SSDs (which I didn't know existed until just now) are also way faster than SATA 6Gb/s SSDs.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-ssd,2952.html

Unless you were commenting on his first post, which I would agree with: most non-techy people have no idea what SSDs are yet.

Sorry, I was commenting on his first post.

120GB SSDs have been around $80 for 1-2 years now.
And the 830 I own was introduced 2011 and already had 520MB/s sequential read speed and 80000 IOPS 4K random read. Samsungs fastest 120GB SSD (the 840 Pro) has 530 MB/s and 97000 IOPS. I wouldn't say that's much of an improvement for 2.5 years.

However I'll admit thanks to newly developed interfaces (PCIe and SATAe) there's already significantly faster models and we'll probably see a lot more when SATAe has been established. It's just not mainstream yet so I ignored it in my post.

I'm not yet comfortable with the idea of PCI-E based drives, though I am well aware of them. That build was also done in about ~7 minutes before I left for work. That said a lot of it is just personal taste/touches from me, I mean the prompt does say it'd be my giftcard to spend.

Would probably spend around 3000$ for surroundspeakersystems (no typical pc-speakers), 1000$ for a good monitor -if that s valid- and have a pc similar to my current one. I love music and films and don't do too demanding stuff.

$5000 seems a bit overkill for a computer. Why would you spend that much even in theory?

I thought RAM and disk speed were the two main bottlenecks now, as opposed to CPU speed.

For freelance graphic design, animation, or 3D modeling work.

Or maybe you're just wealthy. $5k just seems like a lot, it really isn't for top tier parts.

Disk speed yeah, while it doesn't slow down operations it slows down start up significantly.

RAM Speed hardly, maybe you mean RAM size?

I thought RAM is slow compared to the CPU (it still is), but I did some reading and you're right, RAM speed is not too much of a bottleneck these days.

Thanks Excalibur, you sure know how to make an oldhead like me feel loved. I especially liked the $85 optical drive.

The $5k limit is just wildly impractical so that I could see everyone's take on what to get without being like "HERP DERP HERES A MILLION BUCKS GO BUY A SUPERCOMPUTER". This thread is accomplishing exactly what I intended with the debate on computing bottlenecks, SSD tech, etc.

Also, has anyone else noticed that the sandy-bridge chips are like $10 more expensive than the corresponding ivy-bridge/haswell chips on newegg? I was thinking to myself yesterday "hee hee maybe I'll go snatch up a cheap build with some old sandy bridge tech" (cuz im still on a 2nd-Gen Core2Duo) and was like "HERP DERP NEVERMIND $$")

When you're Intel you can charge whatever the fuck you want and when people cry about it you can just say 'Fuck you, pay me' like its Goodfellas.

Its a BD capable drive with a large cache, which if I was dropping 5k$ I might go for. Then again my build is worth approximately 2200$ and I went with an H440 and no opticals. :3

Not sure if "not comfortable with" is a valid excuse to skip almost triple speed.

That's a better excuse though.