New 4k Gaming PC build

[Sacred]

Yes back here again building yet another new computer! My budget is approx £2400 so quite a large budget this time round which is great will be considering a 4k monitor but don't know where to start with that. My current starting point for my build is as follows.


Case/Modding:

Corsair Carbide Series Air 540 High Airflow ATX Cube Case

Phobya LED-Flexlight RGB controller with IR-Remote controller

Phobya LED-Flexlight HighDensity (72x SMD LED's) 120cm RGB

Corsair Individually Sleeved PSU DC Cable Kit,Type 3 (Gen 2), for AXi, AX, HX, RM, TXM - WHITE


Interior Components:

PSU:860W Corsair AX860i Digital, Full Modular, 80PLUS Platinum, 1x120mm Fan, ATX v2.31, PSU

MOBO: Asus Maximus VII Hero Intel Z97, S1150, DDR3, PCIe 3.0 (x16), Quad SLi / CrossFireX, D-Sub (VGA)/ DVI-D/ HDMI, ATX

RAM: 16GB (2x8GB) Corsair DDR3 Dominator Platinum, PC3-19200 (2400), Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 10-12-12-31, DHX, XMP, 1.65V

CPU: Intel Core i7 4790K, S1150, Haswell, 4 Core 4.4GHz Turbo, 5 GT/s DMI, 1.2GHz GPU, 40x Ratio, 84W, Retail *C0 Stepping*

GPU 1: 4GB Asus Matrix GTX980 Platinum, 28nm, PCIe 3.0 (x16), 7010MHz GDDR5, GPU 1241MHz, Boost 1342MHz, Cores 2048, HDMI/3x DP
GPU 2: 4GB Asus Matrix GTX980 Platinum, 28nm, PCIe 3.0 (x16), 7010MHz GDDR5, GPU 1241MHz, Boost 1342MHz, Cores 2048, HDMI/3x DP

COOLING: Corsair Hydro Series H110i GT High Performance CPU Cooler with 280mm Radiator for Intel/AMD CPU's Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro 64 Bit Single DSP OEM English International DVD

HDD:500GB Samsung 850 EVO, 2.5" SSD, 3D V-NAND, SATA 6Gbps, Read 540MB/s, Write 520MB/s, 512MB Cache, 97000K IOPS

OS:Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro 64 Bit Single DSP OEM English International DVD.


Looking for some solid advice around building this 4k gaming rig, my budget for the 4k monitor is separate from the main build.


Thanks in advance as always and looking forward to some advice from our resident Cat

[MrJim]

My only thoughts are that the new AMD 300 series cards are probably going to be released soon, so it might be worth hanging on for a few more weeks to see how they perform. The Titan X has also just been announced too - although that might blow your budget all on its own!

[Sacred]

Do you think the new AMD cards will stand a chance against the current nVidia offerings? We've had almost a decade of green dominance leaving the reds in the dust, unless theyve got an ace up their sleeve what are the chances the new 3XX series cards will really offer any justice to gamers or will we still be stuck with going green if we want highest performance?

I saw a brief preview of the TitanX but can already assume its going to be way out of my budget its going to land at the wrong side of £1500 for sure?!

[MrJim]

I don't think we'll know how good the 300 series will be until they're released, unfortunately. I'm not entirely sure that the 'green team' have dominated the last decade...but I won't get into that discussion again! (we've had quite few heated threads on that topic already!). The 290 & 290X were certainly great performing cards, & were much cheaper than the 780 at the time. We won't have all that much longer to wait to see how the 300 series perform...

[Sacred]

I don't think we'll know how good the 300 series will be until they're released, unfortunately. I'm not entirely sure that the 'green team' have dominated the last decade...but I won't get into that discussion again! (we've had quite few heated threads on that topic already!). The 290 & 290X were certainly great performing cards, & were much cheaper than the 780 at the time. We won't have all that much longer to wait to see how the 300 series perform...

Oh I can't deny that bang per buck team "red" always wins. But when it comes to sheer power "green" have been way ahead for a while.

[Agrippa]

Considering the recent problems with the Samsung EVO SSDs which have come to light, I don't think I'd opt for one of those. Personally I'd go for a different Samsung model, like the 850 Pro, as the price difference isn't very large.

Other than that the build looks good to me, although I personally would have chosen neither the PSU, nor the the RAM. Not because of any quality concerns, but the Corsair PSU is far too expensive compared to similar PSUs of a similar quality (Cooler Master V850 and several EVGA parts spring to mind) and the Dominator RAM is, in my opinion, an utter waste of money.

The fancy Dominator heat sinks add only to the cost, not the performance (they make sod all difference when it comes to overclocking, as has been proven in numerous empirical tests) of the parts and I consider it fairly pointless to pick up the most expensive variety available (it is here, at any rate) of a RAM technology which is now slowly being replaced. I'd suggest making do with some 1600 or 1866 parts instead, as you'll never notice the slightest real world difference anyway.

Come to think of it I'd scratch the Matrix 980s as well, in favour of a couple of Strixes. At stock they perform within a single FPS of each other and the Strix actually overclocks marginally better in many cases, which begs the question why you'd want to pay extra for the Matrix models.

Well, those are my thoughts anyway. Even with a fairly comfortable budget such as yours there little point in pissing the money away on stuff that makes no difference to anything, or is just plain overpriced.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Lol,at the green dominance for a decade. So the 9700 pro,9800xt,x850,x1900xtx,hd5870,hd7970 and hd7970ge which were all as fast or faster than the Nvidia equivalents sometimes for months at a time don't count. Emm......????????!!!!!!!!!!

Let's not forget even the titan z which kind of ran out of steam against the r9 295x2 and is still the fastest card in the world.

Plus a single gtx980 is not fast enough at 4k and that's from people over on ocuk who own the cards.
You ideally need at least two maybe three of them.
If anything at 4k looking over on ocuk it appears the r9 290x in crossfire or trifire,especially the 8gb versions seem to be what people are looking at since vram is problematic at 4k.

Tbh,only the forthcoming titan x or r9 390x seem to be the only single GPU solutions that might do OK at 4k,but even then I expect two of them would be needed and they will both probably have more than 4gb if vram.

Ask Kaapstad over on ocuk - he has both gtx980 and r9 290x multi card setups and should be able to give you some advice having both setups.

[jag272]

Tbh,only the forthcoming titan x or r9 390x seem to be the only single GPU solutions that might do OK at 4k,but even then I expect two of them would be needed and they will both probably have more than 4gb if vram.

We could see this change later this year/early next ofcourse if what was said about DX12 handling SLI/Crossfire VRAM better is true. Quite who that will affect the most is another matter, will Nvidia have enough VRAM past that point or is it just going to give AMD even more of an edge on VRAM. We'll have to see, the real issue ofcourse is how thats gonna handle older games. Unless the DX12 changes can retroactively apply to older games, you're still probably gonna want AMD for the extra RAM for any of the current games were seeing released.

For that reason currently I would say go AMD for 4k, more VRAM and if what was said about DX12 is correct, that VRAM can potentially double rather than be mirrored in Crossfire configs. At that point Nvidia will probably have sufficient VRAM in SLI too but AMD gives you a bigger net to handle the current gen games which may or may not get updated to DX12.