The Totally Rad Guild

Building a new rig, gimme your thoughts. Two versions, one a bit more budget, the other a bit more performance.

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Publi ... r=19151992 - more budget

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Publi ... r=14321429 - more performance

I'm mostly gonna be doing 3D art and gaming, bout 50/50.

the budget one is very similar to what I recently upgraded to.

560ti and i5 2500k.
I'm happy with it, runs pretty much everything on high quality at a reasonable frame rate except witcher 2.

Witcher 2 brings nice rigs to their knees. Such a good game though.

Yeah, I think for gaming the budget one will be more than sufficient, I'm just wondering if the performance increase with heavy duty 3D programs is worth the extra 200 bucks on the performance one...

If you're on a budget, then frankly there's no point in stepping up from the 2500k to the 2600k. In all likelihood you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in real-world applications. As far as going from 8GB to 16GB of RAM...well, you certainly won't see any benefit in gaming, but I'm not sure how serious you are with 3D Art or how much RAM those projects end up using.

Now if I were going to spend more money on any one component from your budget build it would be the video card. Of course, this is coming from the guy that has 2 GTX 580s, so I might be slightly biased...

Hehe, yeah, I might just get the budget one with the 2gig GTX 560 TI. The 580 is a bit too expensive for my taste.

Agreed. It totally depends on how serious you're going to be with the 3D stuff. You'll have longer render times with the budget build, but it'll still work.

Your budget build is almost exactly what I had priced out for a friend of mine who wanted a sub 1k gaming rig. Biggest diff is I'm a huge fan of Seasonic power supplies (M12II 620), and I went with DDR3 1333 to save some money.

I'd highly recommend you...
1. Put the parts into PCPartPicker
2. Copy the Reddit markup (this site makes it for you)
3. Paste the Reddit markup into a new post on /r/buildapc
4. Mention in the post why you're building the PC

The people there are surprisingly good at posting suggestions and recommending alternative parts for the same/similar money. Better than that, they'll point out any little things you may have missed (obscure incompatibility, part being too big for the case, etc.)

+1 for /r/buildapc

doy, I feel really stupid now for forgetting r/buildapc. Thanks guys :S