Going to begin a new build/upgrade, advice needed

[i6pwr]

With the advent of all the remote schooling, this project has been put on the fast track.

My current rig is in my sig, it will be split up into two PC's....the kids workstation PC, and my personal everyday/mild gaming PC.

The work station for the kids will be for school, lab work, microscope cameras, mild gaming, zoom meetings, etc. Will use the 4790K, Z97, RAM and two drives inside another smaller case. I would like to keep the 980Ti for my gaming rig unless I can get into a similar card for under $300. I'm sure I can use a lesser card for the workstation if possible.

For my rig, I'm torn between AMD and Intel, I would like to keep my Noctura N15 currently in use with the 4790K.

My budget if I keep the 980Ti is about $800 for MB, RAM, and CPU, but slightly flexible.

I will likely keep the 1080P monitor, only thinking of possibly being able to use a single 4K monitor down the road, but not set in stone.

I will need a smaller PSU for the workstation, case, and graphics card.

Not trying to build a hard-core gaming rig, but mild gaming and somewhat future-proof. My current rig has done and is doing very well considering it's about 6-7 years old, was future-proofed rather well and I would keep using it except I have to fast track this work station build.

Not brand loyal, like ASRock but please, I welcome all criticism and advice.


Option B is to leave my current gaming rig alone and just build something smaller for the kids, but my current rig is getting old in the tooth.

 

[freakdiablo]

The first thought I had was how long can you wait? IIRC, the new AMD CPUs and possibly the NVidia 3xxx line are both coming out soon, and if anything else those should cause the prices of current tech to drop.

If you need something *now*, like school is starting back up and you really want a GPU for the kids' PC, the 1660 Supers are pretty solid mid range cards for ~$250.

For your desktop, what do you do mainly? Just mild gaming? Intel still has a *mild* edge, so something like a 9700K, midrange Asrock board and 16GB RAM will actually come in $100-200 under your budget. Can't comment too much on specifics though, I'm out of the loop as I've been waiting for the new AMDs to drop.

 

[i6pwr]

I'm able to wait for a bit, I'm thinking the same that the prices will hopefully drop. Perhaps once the start of school has passed, that should help take care of a lot of the current stock. Then maybe before the holidays things might get interesting.

For my desktop, will be a mixed bag of HD video editing, mild gaming isn't a correct term, more like a good bit of gaming but not FPS battles or benchmarking, just don't want any limitations with 1080P and the current crop of games. The video editing will be a large part of the tasks.

 

[i6pwr]

Thinking on this somewhat tonight, I'm leaning towards keeping the 4790K for my own rig, and maybe changing the MB to a Gigabyte Black Edition or Gaming MB. This would allow me to use the current ASRock Z97 MB for the kids' desktop build...or...keep the ASRock MB and build them a rig from an i5 3450 I have lying around, despite being an 1155 socket.

I agree it's not a good time to upgrade from the 4790K rig I'm using with only 1 full HD 1080P monitor.

I would like to utilize the M.2 feature before I go and and build another gamimg PC right now. Does that seem logical?

 

[i6pwr]

Since my ASRock Extreme 4 doesn’t support NVMe, my current dilemma is deciding between building a cheap workstation desktop with another socket 1150 CPU with my current MB, and/or going with another Z97 MB for my 4790K that I can utilize the M.2 at it’s full rated speed.

Options include a Gigabyte Black Edition or GA-Z97X-UD5H LGA, or anything you can recommend.


I feel there’s a lot more left with my 4790K and from a price point, I should wait for a while longer to upgrade. My current largest workload is HD video rendering but the current rig does ok with it.

What MB would you recommend to fully maximize the 4790K. I would love to get a M.2 drive, two would be great but not sure who offers a MB with two M.2 NVMe slots but not a deal breaker.