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There's a decent guide here from ILikeLSUToo on the subject. He goes with a 7970 on his list, but like I said, I'd usually go with a corresponding Nvidia card. Other than that, I recommend it.

The guide has long since been updated a few times. I actually posted a significantly revised version a couple of days ago. Other than being able to stream to Shield, there has never been a compelling reason to go with an NVIDIA card for builds $1000 or less, because NVIDIA has historically been aggressive with marketing, proprietary technologies, spending money to tack their logos and gimmicks onto a smattering of games. Those costs are passed onto the consumer, and as a result, NVidia effectively prices themselves out of the mid-range market. AMD dominates the mid-range market in both CPUs and GPUs. It's their niche. I don't dislike NVIDIA at all, and in fact will be getting a couple of 980s soon, but their marketing strategies have been historically very Apple-like. They do what they do, and it works. But the customer pays for it. The 970 and 980 cards are the first reasonable price/performance I've seen from NVIDIA at the higher end in a long time. The GTX 970 would be a contender for a well-rounded $1,000 gaming PC. But AMD may very well turn around and start aggressively pricing the 290 and 290x, putting them at a price/performance ratio that makes their purchase a no-brainer.

Even our resident NVIDIA spokesman, LSUCoyote, would probably agree with me that if you're not going high-end, AMD is a better value. With the advent of Gsync, and the fact that freesync is not yet available, that is perhaps one more very solid point in favor of NVIDIA. However, anyone doing a mid-range build or lower is almost certainly not going to shell out the cash for the proprietary Gsync-enabled display.

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I still believe that an i5 mixed with a GTXx50 Ti (Ex: GTX 750 Ti) tier card will give you one of the best starter gaming PCs on the market because of the ability to ease of upgrading CPUs to the i7 and the optimization in the Nvidia GPUs.

Not at all. Not even close. It is a common newbie mistake to put the CPU at a higher priority over the GPU, and make the assumption that future-proofing is even a thing. It's not. Don't spend extra on a platform thinking you're investing in some sort of upgrade path. Buy what's going to give you the absolute best gaming performance for the money right here and now, and by the time the CPU is worth upgrading, sockets and chipsets will have changed to the point that you'd need a new motherboard anyway.

This is even truer with Intel. Every refresh and iteration offers about 5-10% better IPC. There are people sitting pretty with Sandy Bridge 2500Ks with no foreseeable upgrade. And that was 3 chipsets ago. Most games weren't using more than 4 cores back then, and they still aren't now. And when games do eventually start to use more than 4 cores, the folks with FX-8320s/50s will be quite happy. Yes, the i5s offer better per-core performance than the AMDs and will yield better performance in particularly CPU-intensive games, but at the OP's budget, which must always be taken under consideration, the difference is not large enough or widely applicable enough to even be a consideration. Especially not at the sacrifice of GPU performance. And i5 with a low-tier NVIDIA card sure would feel like a starter gaming PC, and cost just as much as a build that would actually perform well right now. The only reason I upgrade my CPU is for fun. If I bought my 4770K with the expectation of getting performance improvements in gaming, I'd be sorely disappointed.

Now, for the OP, I did recommend the AE Pentium for its excellent single-threaded performance and unbeatable value. But I'd also have absolutely no objection to him going with an FX-6300 build instead. It really, really does not matter as much as a lot of people tend to think. We aren't trying to pair these with SLI 980s or Crossfire 290s, and even then the presence of a bottleneck is entirely dependent on the game, settings used, and the resolution.

Bottom line: Get what you need now. Outside of planning for more RAM and GPU upgrades/SLI/Crossfire, there is no such thing as future-proofing or upgrade paths.

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I find that they tend to have a better ownership experience, but I'm not here to debate the AMD/Intel thing.

Neither am I, because I know the correct answers and where each of them fit within the market and why.

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I always recommend a 80 PLUS Platinum rated PSU from a trusted brand like Corsair

Terrible advice. I mean, yes, you need a good quality PSU. You do NOT need an 80+ platinum unit, or even Gold for that matter. Or silver. The MOST important things to look for in a PSU are its MANUFACTURER (not brand. There is an important distinction here), and its available 12v rail amperage in reference to its advertised wattage. You find a trusted manufacturer at the proper wattage and amperage, and the rest falls into place. Whether it's 80+ Bronze, Silver, Gold, etc. is hardly an issue. You'll often find 80+ Bronze models with similar quality to the perceived "trusted" Gold models. All this means is rated efficiency, and when you look at its actual efficiency in terms of cost savings, it means jack shite. Learn the manufacturers behind the brands and you'll learn how little 80-Plus platinum really means. Going overboard with motherboard and PSU is just as common of a newbie mistake as buying poor quality motherboards and PSUs.

This post was edited on 9/23/14 at 10:26 pm