Just thinking out loud what components to get

Guys told me to wait for the Skylake chips. Well now there are a few of em out there.

There's a special offer at Jimms.fi
Asus Z170 PRO GAMING mobo, Intel Skylake i5-6600K 3,5 GHz and a 8GB HyperX Fury DDR4 2133MHz of ram for 540€.
Quick previews are saying that you don't get much of a gaming boost compared to the older Haswell chips.

So I'm thinking is it really worth to upgrade to the newest chipset or get an older one cheaper.
Skylake does not support DDR3 (what I currently have for 8GB), so that's gonna be extra costs although it's included in that particular "special offer"

For graphics, I'm thinking about the MSI GTX970 Gaming 4GB GDDR5 PCI-E 3.0
They say that's the best priced card out there. Tho not that good with 4K resolution, but then again I don't have a monitor/TV that supports it either.
GTX970 is around 360-400€ depending whether it's already overclocked or not.

The total costs would be more than I anticipated on spending, but hey, life aint cheap eh?

I know some of you guys recently upgraded your systems, so any thoughts you would like to share?

The 970 "issues" shouldn't be noticeable at 1080p -- however, it's sounding like current NVIDIA cards don't play as well with DX12 as anticipated. I'm pretty happy with my R9 390x.

that R9 390x goes a little over my price range. And I think 4K monitors are way too expensive at the moment and I don't think the prices are gonna come down anytime soon.

I'll have to look into those Nvidia and DX12 issues..

R9 390 is the direct competitor to the 970 (should be cheaper as well). I was just saying that mine has been pretty good. It will draw more power and run hotter than an NVIDIA card though.

Seems like AMD is getting a nice boost from DX12, when NVIDIA is actually suffering from it. Although they say the test results were false

They seem to be priced very close to each other. The 970 actually being 20-30€ cheaper on the local shops.

I'm getting mixed reviews of the two. 390 has 8GB memory compared to 970's 3.5GB/+0.5GB, but can be overclocked to be faster than the 390 and even the 980, they say...

The problem for me is that I don't understand pretty much anything about the specifications. What is important? memory or clockspeed?

I appreciate the input. We'll get this sorted

8GB of memory is overkill -- 3.5GB is fine in all but the most demanding of circumstances... at least for now!! BUT, should you happen to dip into that last 0.5GB, everything goes to shit. I believe that clock speed is probably more important.

I'm sure that Nvidia will get their shit sorted out with respect to DX12, but it might only be supported on their upcoming Pascal cards. Someone please correct me if i'm wrong, but my understanding is that Nvidia does not have a good track record with fixing older cards as they would prefer you upgrade to their latest and greatest offerings. Because AMD takes so long between releases, they have a tendency to provide better legacy support and their cards often get better with age.

Yeah, i prefer AMD cards, but i came very close to jumping ship on my build. It was actually the 970 debacle that put me back in the AMD camp.

So without anybody else's input, what I'm gathering is that the 970 would be possibly the more powerful of the two cards compared RIGHT NOW, but down the line (3 years from now) the R9 390 would be kicking 970's butt with better DX12 support.

Because I only update in every 3-5 years, I suppose I should go with the AMD

And another thing about the future.. The only games I really see myself playing are BMS and Arma 3 and Arma 4? (might need an update anyway by the time new Arma comes out)
Basically PS4 is my single player platform and PC for Multiplayer

My two cents. Go for it
I'd even stay in budget with the gpu by taking the Radeon r9 380

Just recently switched from Nvidia card to AMD cards. Don't remember exactly what I had to do, but there was some tweaking of settings to do with the Nvidia card to get BMS to run w/o stutters. AMD cards were good to go except that crossfire is no good w/ BMS. I think either would be fine w/ BMS, not sure about Arma. I'm kinda partial to AMD because there are a lot more "workarounds" posted about Nvidia cards than AMD, and I like easy!