Your Current Specs: 27" iMac so I need a new PC from scratch
Budget: UK ~£1000 (can be a bit flexible but really don't want to push above £1300)
Main Use: Rate 1-5. 5 being Highest: General usage and gaming, none of the rest.
Monitor Resolution: looking for 2560 x 1440 monitor as that is what I am used to now, but I don't expect to play all games at that, 1080p certainly
List SPECIFIC games or applications that you MUST be able to run well: The latest and upcoming AAA games basically (Alien Isolation, Evil Within, AC Unity, Arkham Knight, Witcher 3 etc)
Is 30FPS acceptable? 60? 120? How important is PhysX / SuperSampling / CUDA to you?: I want 60FPS for the most part but 30 would be acceptable in certain circumstances. I have no real appreciation for the other stuff mentioned yet.
Looking to reuse any parts?: No, need a new PC from ground up.
When will you build?: Do you have a deadline?: Looking to have this built by January.
Will you be overclocking?: Not right now, cos I have no idea what I'm doing.
K guys, I come to you a total noob, I have no idea what I'm doing. I have some frame of reference for what I want in my PC but I need some advice and guidance. I looked at pcpartpicker and was overwhelmed by the choices so I really am a little lost beyond some basic understanding.
1) I'm looking at the new Nvidia GPUs, and I have my eye on the GTX 970. Is there any reason why I should be considering the 980 over it? It seems a lot more money (~£300 vs ~£500) and I don't appreciate the difference between the 2, all I know is that 4GB VRAM seems a good buy right now =/
2) I want either an i5 or i7, which should I get? Also what type? I had no idea there were so many! I saw today an i7, I think it was 4990k, devil's canyon? I don't know what that means but it seemed reasonably priced (~£250) and had 4 cores at 4GHz.
3) I know nothing about motherboards beyond that it must support the CPU socket and that I should leave myself enough expansion slots for everything. With the above 2 CPU/GPU choices in mind what am I looking for in a motherboard?
4) Do I need to worry about cooling? Or is that only necessary if I'm overclocking?
4) Same again for RAM, I want at least 8GB (if not 16GB) but I don't know what I'm looking for beyond that! (clock speeds, DDR4 etc) I thought RAM was cheap not the stuff I was looking at so I figure I'm looking at this wrong.
5) Last, I have a burned image disc (it's legit don't worry) for Windows 7 Upgrade. Is it possible to install this and reuse the CD key to a new build PC. I used it just fine for creating a windows partition on my iMac so the term upgrade does seem a little loose.