An artist's depiction of an Extended Unit Death
The only peripheral I absolutely need is a keyboard. I'd like to try out a mechanical, clickety-clackety one. I have a mouse that could be replaced by something better, so feel free to also include a mouse. I also have a 27-inch, 60hz, 1080p HP monitor laying around that suffices for now, but feel free to include a potential replacement.
There are a handful of good mechanical keyboards out there. My personal recommendation goes out to
WASD Keyboards, but they're also the most expensive. I've heard good things of the
Corsair K70, though that isn't much cheaper. Another popular brand is
Ducky, though people complain about a feedback twang in those boards. Finally, I recommend against Das Keyboards, which used to stand for quality, but over the years they have outsourced their manufacturing and swapped out their parts for cheaper alternatives while maintaining a price premium.
Are there any new technologies coming out soon that I should hold out on?
Nope. The next 6 months have just about nothing new in store for you. Possibly the next big thing is going to be Nvidia's Pascal GPUs, though the speculated release is Q2 2016.
Anydoodle, here's the "smart" build I made for you:
CPU: Skylake i5, yadda-yadda, you know the drill here. On your budget, you can and probably should bump it up to an i7, but it's not mandatory.
HSF: A really nice cooler that's easy to install; it outperforms the most-popular CM Hyper 212 EVO. It'll let you overclock, so long as you aren't trying to set any records.
Mobo: Everything you need, unless you were planning on 3x SLI, in which case, your options are much more limited (and expensive).
RAM: Fast and affordable, like it should be. And G.Skill is a pretty reputable brand as a bonus.
SSD: The economical option. 500GB should be enough to store all of your non-media data comfortably, depending on your games library.
HDD: Hitachi actually has a nice track record on reliability, and a 1TB drive is pretty cheap.
GPU: AMD has done a better job scaling up to resolutions above 1080p, so this is the most obvious choice. An excellent price, too, considering it's $100 less than the comparable GTX 980.
Case: The R5 is a clean, simple case. It's relatively new (succeeding the R4), and yet it's already very popular.
PSU: Shitty price, but a good power supply (Seasonic OEM). If you had to wait on a deal, wait on either this PSU to drop in price or a similar/better one to go on sale.
Now, that's way under budget, so if you had to act like this is government funding and you needed to either spend it or lose it, I'd upgrade the CPU and GPU, and if that wasn't enough, I'd get really fancy and go with the new NVMe SSD technology. Something like this:
CPU: Yay, an i7. I had to manually enter a price because there aren't any 6700Ks available right now, according to PCPP.
SSD: The 950 Pro uses the M.2 slot on the motherboard (which can use it as a boot drive; check reviews if you need to).
And it's fast.
HDD: Why not get a larger hard drive while you're at it? Buy 2 terabytes, get 1 free!
GPU: The 980 Ti is just my favorite high-end card. You could also consider the Fury X, as
it's a fierce competitor for maybe $50 less on average.
PSU: Another Seasonic, though EVGA put their sticker on it; again, not an amazing price, but the extra headroom will get you closer to running at 50% capacity on load, which is where the PSU will generally be most efficient.
And that leaves you with about $150 to get a WASD V2 keyboard.
Edit: Bargain bin:
Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Dec 19 2015, 9:36 pm by Roy.
