Iif you have a Microcenter store anywhere near you. That is by FAR the best place to get a processor and motherboard, as their pricing is equal to, or less than Newegg/Amazon for in-store purchases, and they give you a $40 instant discount when you buy a CPU/motherboard combo.
At this point, if you don't find any amazing sales the 970 is a great card for the price, but I'd keep an eye on Cyber Monday/black friday sales and not be 100% set on a 970. I posted a link yesterday in the Desktop thread to a sale on an AMD 290 4GB for $250 after rebate. A 290 actually benchmarks faster than a 970 in almost every game and resolution, it's actually closer to a 980 in performance.
If I were going to build a system today, I'd do something like this:
PCPartPicker part list/
Price breakdown by merchant
CPU:Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor($229.95 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard:Asus Z97-A ATX LGA1150 Motherboard($139.99 @ Newegg)
Memory:Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory($70.99 @ Newegg)
Storage:Samsung 840 EVO 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive($128.98 @ OutletPC)
Case:Cooler Master HAF XM (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case($69.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply:SeaSonic G-750 750W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply($109.99 @ Amazon)
Operating System:Microsoft Windows 8.1 (OEM) (64-bit)($89.98 @ OutletPC)
Total:$824.87
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-11-06 14:02 EST-0500
That's a build without a video card, but its basically ~$850, leaving a $250 or so budget for a video card to stay under $1100. Now, if you have a copy of Windows you can re-use that knocks $100 off the price, and if you have a Microcenter nearby you can easily knock $40-$100 off the price of the CPU/motherboard, so if either of those things are doable you could be looking at a build where you can add a $300-$400 video card and still stay under your $1100 mark.
All of those things might go down in price though this month, keep an eye on Slickdeals.net, as well as Newegg for sales. If you aren't in a huge hurry to build this thing tomorrow, you can probably piece it together over the next 30 days and save a good amount of money. I built a new PC 2 Novembers ago, I priced out what I wanted in September and it was around $1400, I ended up piecing it together off of sales in November and it was a tad under $1100, it made a HUGE difference. Almost every single part that I wanted went on sale at some point during the month of November.
A few notes on the build I linked:
- only 1 stick of 8 GB ram. Theres really no need to go 2x4GB, dual-channel gives almost no performance boost in gaming, I'd rather save the extra slot for expansion later.
- I just randomly picked a high-rated mid-tower case, but you can do pretty much whatever you want for a case, you can get tons of different good cases for $60-$80 or so.
- only the 1 SSD for hard drives. You can always pull a HD out of your old PC for storage, or add another one down the line. 250GB SSD is going to be enough space for your OS install and half a dozen games installed at any given time. You won't really need more space for gaming, you'll only need more space for storing media if you need to. Now, if you're the type of person that needs your whole Steam library installed at all times, then yeah, you're going to need more standard hard drvies ASAP for storage.
- I didn't add an aftermarket CPU cooler. You won't need one if you don't overclock, and you can even do minimal overclocking on stock cooling. The only real big advantage to aftermarket coolers is going to be noise, many of them are super quiet, whereas the stock coolers that intel uses are a little noisy. But a good aftermarket air cooler won't cost you more than $30 if you want one.
- I didn't add any optical drives, I figured you probably had a DVD writer in your current PC you could salvage. Or if all else fails you can get an external DVD burner for like $20, they're dirt cheap anymore. I haven't actually installed anything off of a disk in years, optical drives are pretty much optional unless you're copying a lot of music/movies for friends and stuff.
