by pam » Fri May 01, 2015 5:23 am
Hi Barney
Be careful for how you spend a large amount buying computer parts.
Things are not that simple anymore, you can spend a lot and get nothing or spend wisely and make a long lasting system.
You have many options to choose from. Both AMD and Intel are excellent and which totally depends on the tasks you do. How much resources you utilize----- Do you GAME a lot, how much multitaskting you do, are you a power user, do you do 3d rendering, image editing, video rendering etc etc.
AMD has very good solutions, but this is a transitional period for both AMD and Intel. By end of 2016 all the parts you buy now will become obsolete, not in terms of performance delta but instead a generational gap that caters to future and beyond. Both AMD and Intel will add a plethora of instruction sets(features) for handling next gen content like 4k/8k videos, 10 gigabit ethernet, DDR4-3800, wifi AC inbuilt into the motherboards like ethernet, sata 3.1 etc etc.
I dont mean to confuse you but I would suggest you go with an Intel Haswell i7 CPU, 16GB DDR3((8GBx 2)-2133Mhz), a decent motherboard from asrock or gigabyte, a good GPU like GTX 970 4/6 GB version(a good GPU is very important these days), if you can wait some time you can now probably buy a real cheap gpu and when AMD HBM GPU's come out like the Radeon 380x/390x you can purchase those as they are scalable for the future. But the most important is the SSD, you can cheap 256 GB ssds or if you have a sale nearby you can even get 512GB for a good deal and if you need redundant storage then you can get an external HDD drive or internal one. For the case, go with a full tower from Antec, corsair or anyone you can get a good deal on. For CPU cooling, I would suggest air cooling options with twin or single tower coolers over liquid coolers. Liquid coolers are just an accessory for extreme overclocking and extreme overclocking is an absolute waste of time and resources these days as they provide little benefit. Single tower coolers are very good and will give you a decent useful overclock.
Logitech makes good cheap wireless keyboard/mouse that will last you a long time.
For the display I would suggest looking for a good 27" 1440p resolution or even a 1080p with a good response time of less than 5ms and preferably having a displayport and HDMI ports. 4K panels will expend your budget, for now.
NOTE: Intel i7 Haswell CPU's can be very expensive. If all you ever do is gaming, buying an Intel system is a waste of money. If you do a lot of multitasking you will notice no difference between an AMD FX 8350 versus an Intel Haswell i7. Today, the only factor left for not recommending AMD CPU's is the power consumption, since the FX CPU's are based on a 3 year old architecture. If you want to save up some money then get an Intel i5 CPU....JUST KEEP IN MIND, THAT THERE ARE ABSOLUTELY NO CPU BENEFITS THAT HAVE TAKEN PLACE WORTH COMPARING OVER THE LAST 4 YEARS.
AMD APU's like the A10-7850k have HSA inbuilt for which code in the linux kernel will arrive with kernel version 4.1 as stable patches will be pulled in. For someone like me, I would bank on this, as APU's are radically dramatic in data processing instead of just having the best benchmarks. With this APU, you could add 32 GB DDR3 of which half will be used as video memory(GPU) i.e 16GB. This is very useful when apps use HSA(hUMA) inbuilt in the APU.