Buying New PC Need Advice (Badly)

[DissocialPersonality]

Okay so ive decided i want a new gaming computer and since i have to get one anyway because my mom is joining the internets so ill give her my old one. i dont know much about computers in the way of telling whats good and what is bad but i want to go as far as my budget will take me

 

I want to

1 Run a Performance Heavy ENB

2 Run 4K Textures

3 Run 4K Tree and Grass Mods

4 Run 4K Body Mods

 

so my question is can i do all that with $1500-$2000 (might be able to do $2500 but it would hurt) or no?

 

and if so what do you recommend for a PC and Graphics Card or anything else i might need

 

Thank You in Advance

 

 

[Slick Silk]

Hey there, I did a little bit of snooping around and was able to find some parts around this price range, so here we go:
Motherboard: MSI Z97 Gaming 5 - Around $150
CPU: Intel i7 4790k - Around $320
RAM: I'd recommend either Kingston's Hyper X Fury 1866MHz RAM or G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 1866MHz, generally you will not find a performance increase in games with faster RAM, however if you're planning on video editing you could use more MHz in your RAM modules. If not then in my opinion it's a waste of money since you can throw in a few more bucks for different- more important parts. The RAM will cost about $130 for 16GB, (2x8GB)
PSU: Corsair's RM850 850W seems like a good choice - Around $125
GPU: This was a bit of a tough one, I'd recommend going with a dual SLI setup such as 2x GTX 980. This is the most powerful single GPU card that's out there for gamers, and you have to keep in mind that Skyrim has quite a lot of limitations when it comes to dual GPU setups and sometimes it might not use the full potential of both graphics cards so it's quite useful to at least have one very powerful graphics card that can pull it off.
Another option for the graphics cards would be the GTX 970 in SLI. However those are a bit weaker than the GTX 980, and recently a lot of the users complained that the card was only using 3.5GB of its memory and not 4GB as advertised. Nonetheless it's still a very good GPU for the price, since it's much cheaper than the GTX 980, but bear in mind that you won't get as good performance, especially in 4K.

2x GTX 980 (ALSO, I recommend going with Gigabyte's version of this GPU since they have the most crancked up one which will give you the best performance) = $1100 ish
2x GTX 970 (Also Gigabyte) = $750 ish
You always have the option of Triple SLI with GTX970 since it'll be around the same price as 2x GTX 980, however I wouldn't recommend that as the driver support isn't that great and you most likely won't see much of a performance increase and especially not in skyrim.
CPU Aftermarket cooler: If you're up for it you could go with a custom water loop, but if you don't want to mess around I'd recommend the Corsair Hydro Series H100i. - $100
Case: Personal preference, I'd recommend something from Corsair, NZXT or possibly Cooler Master. Something that's reliable and has good airflow, you can probably catch something great out at around $100 - $150.
Storage: I'd recommend an SSD for a boot drive and some hard drive for your general storage, assuming you haven't got any already, a good choice for an SSD would be the ADATA Premier Pro SP920 256GB SSD- $105, I use this SSD and it's super reliable and I get Read/ Write speeds at around 540MB/s / 350MB/s. For the HDD it depends on how much you need but I'd recommend the WD Black Series HDDs. WD Black 1TB is around $70, 2TB is around $125- this should be more than enough for the average gamer.
OS: Windows 10 will be rolling out soon and users who have Windows 7 and up will be able to upgrade for free, so if that's what you'd like to do you can just grab a copy of Windows 7 for as cheap as $40 if you search well (I'm from the UK so it's pretty hard for me to look up prices, but I'm pretty sure you can pull it off)
Windows 8.1 is around $95
The grand total is around $2200 if you decide to go for the most expensive option (2xGTX 980 and 2TB Storage). I'm sure you can find the parts cheaper, I've only looked on Amazon and I guess they tend to have higher prices than other online retailers, you can probably still get all these parts for cheaper if you look them up elsewhere.
EDIT: Hurr Durr I forgot to add the monitor itself, I'd recommend something with G-Sync to get he most out of your gaming experience, but it'll cost you a bit more, 4k Gaming monitors are around $700 from what I could find, such as the Acer Predator XB280HK.

Hope it's helpful

[Dubhorizon]

Copy pasted from Tom's Hardware site. Google searched.

 

CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($339.99 @ Newegg)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14 65.0 CFM CPU Cooler ($74.98 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: Asus Z97-A ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($137.99 @ NCIX US)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($144.00 @ Newegg)
Storage: Crucial MX100 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($109.99 @ Micro Center)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($84.99 @ Newegg)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 4GB Superclocked ACX 2.0 Video Card ($569.99 @ Amazon)
Case: Corsair 750D ATX Full Tower Case ($139.99 @ Micro Center)
Power Supply: EVGA 750W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($104.99 @ NCIX US)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 (32/64-bit) ($94.99 @ B&H)
Total: $1791.90

 

You could look for a better graphics card though if you want 4k everything everything. 

[DokiRenault]

Hello

 

Your budget should be more than enough, if it's just 4K textures and the resolution too.. I'm currently running Skyrim on a computer with an i7-3820 with 8 GB RAM and a 3.5 year old GTX 560 Ti. I'm not running (much) 4K textures (I have only one body texture with this scale.) or ENB but 2K textures and a high res map. If my GPU was just newer, it should be able to handle 4K and ENB. 

 

I would recommend you an Intel LGA 2011-v3 socket processor, as these are most powerful ones and come with DDR4 support. They also use quad channel memory architecture with results in higher memory bandwidth. They lack an internal GPU, something you probably don't need. :-) 

A few years ago, I would have also recommended AMD CPUs/APUs, but today not anymore. The FX-8350 with it's AM3+ socket is not bad but lacks PCI-Express 3.0 support, something which is going to be more important in the next few years, as the GPU bandwidth requirements will rise with the dedicated video memory on the GPU. This evolution came with the new consoles as these have more memory than their predecessors. 

The strongest AMD APU, the  A10-7850 with an FM2+ socket does have PCIe 3.0 support but instead lacks processing power.

Also, you should have at least 8 GB of RAM if not 16. In 2012/2013 I thought it would suffice. It does suffice to a certain point, but when using VMWare it does not always. Depends on what you're going to with your computer.

 

When it comes to a GPU you can decide wheter you want AMD or Nvidia. You should go with nothing less than an AMD R9 280/290 or a Nvidia GTX 960 if not 970. The minimum video memory should be 3 GB if not 4 or even 8. Cards with that high amount are coming soon.

I would still recommend waiting for a DirectX 12 card, like I am doing it right now, but your situation makes it kinda impossible. :-)

 

Your Mainboard must fit your socket LGA 2011-v3.

It should have at least S-ATA III (6 GBit/s). Better would be S-ATA Express or M.2. Both are very fast and cutting-edge. M.2-SSDs are about the half the price of a S-ATA-III- or S-ATA-Express-SSD. I prefer using SSDs as a system drive. For games and software I use big HDDs with 7200 RPM and keep them defragmented.

 

I hope I could help you. :-)

[joemonco]

 

I want to

1 Run a Performance Heavy ENB

2 Run 4K Textures

3 Run 4K Tree and Grass Mods

4 Run 4K Body Mods

 

so my question is can i do all that with $1500-$2000 (might be able to do $2500 but it would hurt) or no?

 

You can do that for under $500.  Assuming you already own a Windows license and monitor, barebones kit from Tiger Direct for $265 with GTX 960 for $210.

[DissocialPersonality]

thanks everyone

[BlueShinobi]

Not sure if you've ordered this or not.

Though I basically agree with the above builds, the one thing I want to stress is that buying the top of the line video card is usually either a very, very expensive habit, or else a poor one-time buy. For the cost of the 980, you can get a 970 now, and then a very good card that's in the 970 price range, in about 2 years. Which will keep you on the cutting edge much, much longer than the 980 now.

[afa]

Would really want to see some gameplay framerates of people who has high end hardware and running skyrim using those mods.

Also 4K textures only or 4K resolution as well?

 

As far as I know, 4K resolution are giving even top of the line video card "not a very easy" time running modern game, granted Skyrim isn't exactly a "modern" game given its relative age.

 

Plus for whatever reason vanilla Skyrim is strangely cpu intensive which adds a layer of complexity for getting good framerate.