Welcome to October’s Build!
The Mainstreamer is a confident $1000 rig. At this price point we will give you a setup that will run all modern games at 1080p, 60fps with most if not all settings maxed out. I happen to be running a 970 in my personal gaming rig and it is a phenomenal card with great performance and low power consumption. So let’s lay it out:
Processor ($235.00):
Intel i5 4690K 3.5GHzMemory (RAM) ($44.99):
Corsair Vengeance Blue 8 GB (2X4 GB)
Graphics Card ($329.99):
ASUS STRIX GeForce GTX 970 Overclocked 4 GB
PSU ($53.00):
Thermaltake 550W 80 PLUS Bronze ATX
Motherboard(Bargain at $90.99):
MSI ATX DDR3 2400 LGA 1150 Z97
Case ($67.99):
NZXT H230 Silent Chassis, White
Storage SSD Boot Drive ($89.00):
Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSDSecondary Storage Drive ($46.99):
Seagate 1TB SATA 6Gb/s HDDOptional Extras not included: DVD Drive, Monitor
TOTAL PRICE: $957.95 (Prices are subject to change)
The Details:
There is a little room in the budget for a different motherboard in case the price of this one spikes. A good Z97 by ASUS, MSI or Gigabyte will serve you well, should you need to find an alternative.
Let me explain why I am going with last year’s i5 iteration instead of Skylake.
Skylake is a great and powerful processor and it has a lot of benefits for a system. If you are using your PC for a lot of things and not just for gaming and general use then you might want to think about getting this. But for now the price and limitations aren’t worth it for a gaming build. For one thing you have to upgrade your motherboard to the H170 or Z170 which generally cost 50% more at the very least. On top of that Skylake enabled motherboards require DDR4 ram, which is a ton more expensive than the perfectly gaming viable DDR3. Pass for this build, but maybe the next build for the high budget will have it.
There was a commotion earlier in the year about the 970 GTX and the fact that its advertised 4GB of memory was actually 3.5GB with an extra 0.5GB in check that was too slow for gaming. I reckon this was probably a mixup between the tech guys and the ad guys, but the damage was already done to the otherwise sterling reputation of this card. I bought mine even after finding out that it was running at 3.5GB and I don’t regret it. Fantastic card, plays everything at 60fps, butter smooth, and gives you access to the useful NVidia experience and ShadowPlay tools.
While the SSD doesn’t bring much for gaming other than faster load times, I consider it essential to any modern build that isn’t budget. My computer has been so much faster with one of these as a boot drive and I will never go back to HDDs as a primary drive for any pc I build in the future. The prices are falling constantly so some pretty great deals are available, and the Evo 850 is among the best of them.
So there you have it, if you have any questions please feel free to shoot them out in the comments.
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