So I've been saving up for a while now so that I can build myself a high-end PC and at the moment my budget is the highest it is ever going to be (£2100). I'm planning to buy all my parts soon to coincide with the release of Windows 10 and I figured I should post this here to get a second opinion in case I'm overlooking something.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor (£296.34 @ Aria PC)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 82.5 CFM CPU Cooler (£65.46 @ CCL Computers)
Thermal Compound: Arctic Cooling MX4 4g Thermal Paste (£3.95 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Asus X99-A ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard (£188.27 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR4-2666 Memory (£118.91 @ Scan.co.uk)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£48.59 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£131.95 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Video Card (£568.79 @ Aria PC)
Case: Fractal Design Define R5 (Titanium) ATX Mid Tower Case (£77.10 @ CCL Computers)
Power Supply: EVGA 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£99.99 @ Dabs)
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE DVD/CD Writer (£9.38 @ CCL Computers)
Wireless Network Adapter: Asus PCE-N53 802.11a/b/g/n PCI-Express x1 Wi-Fi Adapter (£19.98 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua NF-A14 FLX 68.0 CFM 140mm Fan (£17.19 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua NF-A14 FLX 68.0 CFM 140mm Fan (£17.19 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua NF-A14 FLX 68.0 CFM 140mm Fan (£17.19 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua NF-A14 FLX 68.0 CFM 140mm Fan (£17.19 @ Amazon UK)
Monitor: Asus PB287Q 60Hz 28.0" Monitor (£372.14 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £2069.61
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-07-21 10:45 BST+0100

I am going to be using my PC for 4K gaming and for relatively frequent 3D work using applications like Blender, Photoshop and ZBrush. For those reasons I picked the X99 Chipset and the 5820K so that I can take advantage of extra cores and threads. I've picked a GTX 980 Ti because it is the best single GPU for running games at 4K and it should allow me to get 60 FPS on most games with a small bit of fiddling around with the settings.

I will be installing Windows and my programs on the 120GB SSD and installing Steam on the 500GB SSD. I will be putting everything else (music, films, documents) on a 1TB external hard drive.

The four Noctua fans will be set up with three intakes and one exhaust. Two intakes at the front, one on the bottom and one rear exhaust. I could get a cheaper CPU cooler but I want a reasonably silent PC and I'm going to overclocking my CPU as much as I can.

Should I keep the 500GB SSD or should I get a WD Black 1TB HDD to save £80? Is there anything I'm missing/overlooking that will cause me problems when it comes to building my system? Is there anything I could do differently to build a better system?

 

Getting two SSDs isn't worth it. Just get the largest size you can fit into the budget (500GB seems like the go here).

The Noctua cooler you're getting will come stock with some thermal paste, so you don't need to buy your own.

Otherwise looks good.

 

He's expressed a desire to do 3D work, which is one of the few things that actually would benefit from having multiple SSD's due to how I/O intensive it can be. Additionally, he's mentioned his desire to overclock, so relying on stock thermal paste isn't ideal.

As for you OP, I will say that you need to pick a different wireless adaptor. I have the N53, and it has caused me nothing but problems. The drivers are shit, it's caused multiple blue screens, and I've had to do manual patching of the drivers to make it even halfway workable before the latest driver update. Having the card plugged in will BSOD Windows when upgrading from 8 to 8.1, and I wouldn't be surprised if similar happened with Win10. I have never actually seen the damn thing exceed 20 Mb/s, despite being rated for up to 300 Mb/s. It has caused me no end of problems, and I would honestly suggest a USB Wireless adaptor over it. It's gotten a little better with the driver update in January, but it remains the worst wireless adaptor I've had the misfortune of using.

As for the rest of your build, I'm not seeing any issues. It's about what I'd build if I had a similar budget. Since you say you'll be doing 3D work, I'd stick with the dual SSD's because IO being a bottleneck is a bitch, and with your processor it seems like that'd be the most likely point that would slow you down if you were relying on an HDD. For general storage, I'd still suggest you eventually get an HDD, but for the immediate future the SSD is far more useful. Given the size of your system drive, you'll be putting games on the data drive and you'll definitely see the performance jump from being able to load things from an SSD that isn't running the OS.

 

Wireless Network Adapter: TP-Link Archer T4U 802.11a/b/g/n/ac USB 3.0 Wi-Fi Adapter (£24.99 @ Amazon UK)

I've decided to go with this USB wireless adaptor instead. From the reviews I've found I think it's unlikely that it will give me any problems.

Thanks for your help.

 

I can't be bothered to add the mouse mat to the list but when I'm actually buying the system I'll just get a £15 mouse mat from Scan.

 

Just remember, if you ever add a second GPU for gaming or processing power on your 3-D work, you're only getting one full PCIe 3.0 x16. The second will bump down to x16/x8. It may not be worth it for you, but if you're going to be looking for every last ounce of power/speed, consider stepping up $190 (US-Newegg.com) to the I7-5930k. Again, it's not worth it if you're sure you won't ever put a second or third GPU in your system (and might not even be worth it if you are, again, just something to consider).

EDIT:

tl;dr You may never want to use your M.2 connector or use a PCI-e card except for one GPU. If that's true, ignore the rest. If you may, then read on.

On that particular board, the M.2X4 socket (if you plan on using it) shares bandwidth with slot 4, and when you're using a 28 lane CPU, the PCI X16 slot 3 can only run X8. So if you ever think you're going to get a M.2 type connection hard drive, either junk this board, or step up to the next CPU (the PCI-e still shares the lane, but the 40 lane CPU allows for the PCI-e slot 3 to run X16. Also, with the 28 lane CPU, the PCI-e x16_2, x1_1, and the USB3 connectors all share the same bandwidth, making the PCI-e slots both run at x1 mode (automatically—the E56 USB3 may be able to be turned off, or you can just not plug a USB 3.0 into either port in line with the LAN jack, as those are your E56 USB ports). If you're only plugging in your GPU into the PCI-e slots, it shouldn't be a problem.

Here's a link to the MOBO manual (of course, make sure I got the right manual). Give it a read and make sure you're not limiting yourself to future upgrades if you so desire.

 

On that, you should swap the 120 SSD for an M.2 and use that for your OS instead. Add a 250 SSD for essential apps and such, and probably a 2TB spinny disk as generic storage.

 

Not with the MOBO he chose. He can't use a full x16 PCI-e slot with a M.2, which makes his choice of GPUs somewhat wasteful.

Do you know of a board that doesn't share the lane without him having to bump up to a 40 lane chip? I'd guess their out there, but . . .

 

I will be getting a second GPU in about 8 months and I may be wrong but I don't think that running a GPU at x8 actually affects the performance. Even if if performance is affected it wont be by much and I can't justify spending an extra £100 for 12 more PCIe lanes and a slight bit more performance.

As for PCIe x16_2 and x1_1 running at x1 speed, it doesn't bother me. I'm not going to be using the expansion slots for anything other than GPUs.

The M.2 slot only increases the potential rate of data transfer, it doesn't actually change the rate of data transfer. This means with most M.2 SSDs out there you wont actually see any difference in performance in an M.2 slot as they run at 500MBs which is beneath the limit imposed by SATA III. An M.2 SSD would only give you improvements if the drive operated at 800+MBs and even then the performance benefits wouldn't make up for the price premium IMO.

I'm using the 120GB SSD for my OS and essential apps and I'm going to use my 500GB SSD for games. I was planning to add a HDD in a couple of months but I've changed my build a slight bit and I am now going to get a 1TB WD Green as well.

I've removed the MSI 980 Ti and I am instead going to get the Palit 980 Ti as there is only a 2 FPS difference at 4k. The £40 I save will go on the HDD.

Thanks for your help. I actually posted this on the Linus Tech Tips forums to see if anyone there could help and the only things that wer posted was someone telling me to get an EVGA or Seasonic PSU and a picture of Homer Simpson. I find it funny that a fanfiction community has helped me more than a tech community.

 

This article would agree with you, at least for gaming. I'd still wonder about rendering video, especially 3D video, but on the other end of it, you're asking the right question: is the increase worth the money? And, only you can answer that.

 

I think you might want to wait a little longer and at least wait to see some benchmarks for the upcoming skylake cpus that are coming out on August 15th. You may want to consider holding some money back from the budget for a windows hello authenticator.

 

He's getting socket 2011-3, so skylake is pretty much not relevant to him. Besides, there are already some leaked benchmarks (of course, no one knows how accurate they are), but they show the usual 5-10% performance increase. So, like always these past few years nothing really special.

Why exactly should he do that?

 

I haven't looked into buying a new PC lately so I wasn't aware that skylake is using a different socket. My bad.

Regarding Windows Hello...

I said 'consider' rather than 'do it' because i don't know the exact situation he'll be using it in, I assume it will be at his home. But if he has a situation where he doesn't necessarily want everyone to have full access to his computer then at the very least it'll give him a minor convenience of not having to use login information to sign in locally.

In the somewhat likely event that microsoft passport gets adopted by many websites then he won't have to remember login information for them and he'll have greater security when using those websites as well. I know he said it was mostly a gaming and graphical design machine but I imagine he'll use it for personal use as well. Banks and retail sites should view this feature very positively. Furthermore, depending on the solution you use, the peripheral itself should be cheap.

I am fairly sure that biometric logins are the future for all platforms and will spread to more and more devices. Security is an ever more important issue as more and more people and companies keep getting hacked.

 

Also Skylake only has four cores. The 3D work that I'm doing benefits from having more cores so the 6 core Haswell-E is superior to the 4 core Skylae in that regard.

 

Well, the i7's have hyperthreading, so while they have only 4 cores they have 8 threads. The same applies to the 5820 as well though, so you have 6 cores but 12 threads. So in the end, skylake is still not revelant to you. The successor of Haswell-E will be Broadwell-E, which according to some roadmaps should come out next year, but since I doubt that you'd want to wait that long go for the 5820.

Something else about 4k gaming: I hope that you're aware that you'll have to turn down the details to medium (maybe even lower in some extreme cases) to get 60 FPS at that resolution in some games. Despite 4k being heavily advertised, it's not really a thing yet with the performance of current high-end GPU's (at least on highest settings in demanding games), especially since GPU's were stuck on 28nm for so long. Here are some 4k benchmarks from pcworld in their Fury X review. Since you want to stick with Nvidia, just ignore all the stuff about the Fury X and take a look at the graphs to get some gauge on how 4k performance is with the 980Ti.