Alright, OP, you're getting bombarded with feedback here and I think it's dancing around the question of importance here, lots of contextless information, and nothing to do with it, so let's discuss the
philosophy of use here. What are you actually trying to accomplish with this machine?
A gaming machine will be competent at artistic work, and an artistic powerhouse will be competent at gaming, but you can't
focus on both, not on a 3k budget, and you shouldn't try to halfass somewhere between them, either.
Do you want the best gaming machine that does artwork as a secondary function, or the reverse? If you want a gaming machine, then at your budget, you're looking at a triple 1080P monitor setup, heavy GPU focus, and only moderate CPU focus.
First, let's start with some more general Dos and Don'ts for ALL systems you might consider:
-You do not need water cooling, plain and simple. Water cooling is either for overclocking or silent operation, and you haven't indicated
such a preference for silence, that you're willing to spend hundreds of dollars placing everything on a liquid loop so that you can remove almost all the fans from everything but the radiator.
-You do not, under any circumstance, need DDR3-2400 RAM. RAM past DDR3-1600 is valuable when you're running a low end system with an APU, because the integrated GPU will bottleneck on the system RAM, so you try to minimize that bottleneck. Beyond APUs, however, even DDR3-1333 will not meaningfully bottleneck your system, let alone DDR3-1600.
-You do not need a dedicated sound card, let alone a $129 one. Intregrated soundcards provide high quality sound these days that is far past sufficient for gaming or casual music or movie use. The only reason to get a dedicated soundcard is for surround on headphones (CMSS3D or Dolby Headphone) and it looks like Razer might have free software that can do that now. Even then, a $25 soundcard can do surround processing. The only reason to get an
expensive sound card is for an amplified sound output for high end sound equipment and sound far beyond your needs for hardcore audiophile applications.
-You don't need aftermarket coolers or thermal compound; you're not overclocking, so stock equipment is fine, thermally.
-If you're going to get a 7200RPM hard drive for bulk storage, may as well make it a Western Digital Caviar Black; they have higher random read/write speeds than other consumer 7200rpm drives.
Let's go over the options here for specific types of machines and what you're getting into with each:
1.) Top End Gaming Machine
A single 7970 (or 770, or 780, or Titan) will NOT competently do gaming across three 1080P monitors, plain and simple. This is not my personal judgement; this is citable fact (
source). A single GPU is simply not fast enough to deliver consistently good framerates across intensive games according to the cited testing, and that testing was only with three 1680x1050 monitors! Three 1080P monitors would be 18% higher resolution.
With two GPUs, and three monitors, however, you cannot afford the 3930k by any means that I'm aware of.
In short, for a triple monitor gaming machine, you're left at exactly the machine I recommended, with the 4770k and the two 770s. Any more focus on the CPU, and you either can't afford a GPU setup to allow it, or you'll run up short on budget for screens. For this machine I'd get the three 1080P IPS displays I recommended, so you can keep color accuracy for the artwork. If you went
really cheap on the screens, you might be able to still get the 3930k, but it wouldn't be good for artistic work.
2.) Top end Art Machine (single monitor)
A 4770k will not be slow at rendering, or any other task, not by any stretch of the imagination. It is an
extremely fast CPU. It's just that there are CPUs that are, in the practical sense, a
little bit faster. So if your goal is to squeeze every spare second out of every rendering job as the first and foremost concern, get the 3930k, and pair it with a single OCed Radeon HD 7970 or GHZ Edition or a Geforce GTX 770 (the two are basically interchangeable, though AMD's game bundle is better), and a single 2560x1440 or 1560x1600 IPS panel display, something like Barbaric Soul's 30". Toss in a decent power supply in the 500-600W range and call it a day.
3.) Single Monitor Gaming Machine
If this is all you want, then my advice is simple: don't spend $3000. Get an i5 3570k, go with the single 7970 or 770 again, get 8GB of RAM, an Asrock Z77 Extreme 4, toss it into a Zalman Z11 mid tower with a Rosewill Hive 550W power supply, get a nice 27" or 30" IPS panel (still 1440p or 1600p) to do the art stuff on the side, and call it a day. You could probably get away with not much more than $2000, it'll cream games, and it'll still be quite fast at any kind of artwork.
I'd put this together in partpicker, but work has been long, and I'm tired
Anyways, give thought to what you actually want. Advice telling you to buy this, or buy that, isn't useful if it's not tailored to your specific philosophy of use. There's a set of three types of machines, and the
kind of setup that would be ideal for each, that you can fit into your budget. There's always room for tweaking, since these machines are merely general outlines, but they're the kind of setup that's ideal for each machine type.
Edited by Catamount, 03 July 2013 - 08:00 PM.
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Vincent Vascaul, on 02 July 2013 - 11:58 AM, said:
