Tell me the (near') Future!...of gaming PC components

I'm thinking of building a new PC soon. I know generally what I want, be right or wrong. But what I do not know, and many of you seem so well informed, is what I can buy to be future proof, or at least allow for good head-room. New cpu's (intel) coming out in the near 6 months? That is key right there. Proper MB's/chipsets for the new Intel cpu's?, New memory here or almost on the door-step? Solid State or Hybrid HDD stepping up in size and affordability? Any new technology for PC gaming that might be pertinent and I should plan in on the PC build side. GPU (Nvidia) is already bought, 4K ready. So not going there.

But what I do not want to do is build a good PC and then find I only planned for the short haul.

Thank you!

Future proofing is a myth and there will always be newer better parts coming out.

PC components are always getting better - if you wait, you'll be waiting forever. Just go for it, dude.

CPU - If you want a future proof mobo then get something like a z97 or h97 chipset. That will work with current intel 4xxx (Haswell) cpus and with future Broadwell based cpus next year. Note that Intel isn't really pursuing a strategy of massively improving performance, rather they are keeping marginal performance improvements and reducing power consumption. So you can pretty much buy a good cpu and motherboard combination now and it will last you a long time.

RAM - the Haswell-E series support DDR4 ram, but currently it is too expensive to be worth considering. The performance benefits are also marginal. Currently, the benefits that DDR4 brings over DDR3 is reduced power consumption (not that ram is extremely power hungry).

HDD - It is totally worth it to spend on getting an SSD as it improves general usability immensely. If you have a lot of data get a secondary HDD. Hybrid drives aren't quite worth it.

About your graphics card, you didn't really state what it is. Ultimately, current cards aren't totally suited for 4k unless you like to reduce frame rates or turn down settings (but what is the point of 4k then?). So in the future you're probably looking to put those cards in SLI, so you're going to need a motherboard with 2 pci-e 16x slots (with adequate spacing).

Socket 2011-v3 is going to be a big step up with it's DDR4 capabilities but it's not likely to be taken advantage of by game devs any time soon so I wouldn't hold off just to buy that. By the time devs are making use of it the tech will be a couple of iterations in making it much cheaper and more stable by eliminating any problems that inevitably show up with brand new technology.

So right now I'd just go for a good i5 processor with a decent motherboard. Definitely get an SSD though, the step up from even a Hybrid HDD is huge.

@tuxfool: Don't forget that DDR4 also allows for much larger capacity. I think the largest sticks I've seen have 16GB per stick allowing for the total ram for a dual channel set up to be 64GB.

4 GB of VRAM is probably the most important thing these days.

I do positively understand the first 2 posts, but it is still best to be grounded in the near future for practicalities sake. The overview is that the rug is always pulled, but oftentimes even quicker by negligent planning. Simply bad economics.

Thank you for those last 3 posts, so far! Those are the practicalities I was fishing for. Thank you for the detail. And the GPU issue(or non-issue) is exactly why I am asking this apothaeos. I didn't want to make another poor choice by simply throwing money at something brute force, though for the moment I am in GPU heaven. Understanding where things are really going is vital. I will be taking some notes to guide me by. tuxfool, RollingZeppelin, apothaeos

No such things a future proofing, especially these days. Video cards will last around 2-4 years depending on the resolution you are playing at, and CPU/RAM will last 3-5 years typically. Traditional hard drives give you a lot of storage and are cheap, but are slow compared to Solid State Drives. Solid State Drives are super fast, but more expensive than hard drives, that being said SSD prices have fallen under $1/GB, so you can get a drive with decent capacity for not all that much.

A solid build right now would be an Intel i5 or i7 family of processors along with an Nvidia GTX 760, 770, 970 or 980 (or the equivalent AMD cards). RAM would typically be in the 8-12GB range of DDR3 1600, and a good SSD with a regular hard drive for storage. For power supply, something in the 700-850 watt range that is Bronze, Silver, or Gold certified (the higher the rating the better). Don't skimp on the power supply - get one with a good efficiency rating that has enough juice to power the system with some 50-100 watts of headroom to spare. Luckily the current CPUs out now are really, really good so a decent i5 or i7 will last quite a long time before needing to build a new box. As for GPU, it all comes down to resolution - if you are using a 1080p monitor at 60hz, something like a GTX 770 or 970 will be fine. If you are running a monitor with a higher resolution. or if are running a 120 or 144 hz monitor, than a top-tier card like a GTX 980 or Titan is a good idea. Avoid SLI or Crossfire. It never works right.

Everything else is personal preference.

Straight dope...

CPU
In 2015 and into 2016 the new Intel socket will be changed to LGA 1151, it is the future Intel microprocessor compatible socket which will support the Intel Skylake microprocessor...and likley their consumer grade processor going forward until 2017. Motherboards based on this socket will feature support for both DDR3 and DDR4 memory, and DDR4 will be standard by 2016. You can't buy a socket LAGA 1151 yet so it hard to future proof in that regard,

I doubt AMD will change sockets in the next 18 months, but who knows. My guess is the newst AMD socket now will still be the best two years from now.

RAM
Its going to go DDR4, "It Is Known, Khaleesi!" DDR3 will still be around for awhile, but in two years all the cool kids will have DDR4.

GPUs
Those get upgraded every year too. In 2015 we will see more Maxwell chips, and in 2016 it Pascal chips with possibly a new connector that will replace PCIe with NVLink....maybe. That connector, if put on the consumer level, will be a mezzanine connector, the type of connector typically used to sandwich multiple PCBs together...its is fat, wide and full of pins. It is unknown if that will make it soon to the consumer/enthusiast market, but speed is need to go forward and most people are saying PCI-e4 will be too slow.

So, bottom line, everything might change in mid-2016, and by late 2016 it will be safe to see what shakes out. I think if nothing else you will see a new Intel socket and a new chipset that everyone will be using. If these changes stack up anyone building a machine in early 2015 will be building another whole new machine in 2017.

I'll add my voice to the annoying chorus of people telling you that future-proofing is impossible. A couple of years from now people will be putting together rigs that cost half as much as yours did and perform just as well.

Buy decent (but not super high end) stuff now, and spend a bit more to upgrade when stuff on the horizon is actually more than just stuff on the horizon.

Also, if you're building a PC in 2014 and you're booting from a spinning disk, you've fucked up, definitely get an SSD.

Spend the extra money to get a Nvidia card, and make sure it has at least 3 vram.

SSD's are exspensive, so I'd get a small one and use it for booting up and some essential software type stuff, then get a HDD for the bulk of your data.

i5 or i7 processor, probably i7 for 'future proofing' as it has hyperthreading to emulate more cores (although this feature isn't really put to use yet, I imagine it will be at some stage as the newer consoles have 8).

@anywhereilay: I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for multicore support. I ain't no programmer, but as I understand it, multicore support is only really prevalent in applications where it's comparatively simple to implement (photoshop, encoding, 3D modelling, etc).

The primary reason that PC games tend not to make full use of all available cores isn't that consoles have been incapable of taking advantage, so only a small portion of the potential audience could benefit, it's because coding multiple threads for games is real difficult, and there are diminishing returns on the man-hours invested the more cores you work to support. The fact that the new consoles have 8 cores doesn't change this.

Are the new CPUs going to be much better? I have an Ivy Bridge and from what I have understood Haswell is not much better, it didn't bring the leap in perforamce that Sandy bridge did. I have a i5 3570K and that still seems pretty good, or am I wrong?

@pcorb: That's me told...haha. Fair enough, disregard my previous statement then. An i5 sounds like a pretty good deal now.

I'm just gonna pretend that hyper threading still means something anyway, like I'm well endowed. And not over compensating.

There is little reason to expect mainstream desktop parts to adopt DDR4 until post 14nm Broadwell release, don't let that factor into your purchase. Yes you can get a DDR4 machine now with Haswell-E but that is well beyond the requirements of most users. A z97/Haswell system right now paired with some 2133 1.5V memory (typically shown to be the sweet spot since Haswell makes use of higher bandwidth) will be more than enough for a few years to come.

Any GPU you purchase will be 28nm for the foreseeable future, 20nm has seen several delays (Maxwell was originally designed as a 20nm part) and at this point some people are expecting both Nvidia and AMD to skip the 20nm process entirely and move to a 16nm process straight off the bat. That won't likely happen for another 18 months so short of Nvidia launching a Titan II or something similar based on a physically larger 28nm Maxwell die I wouldn't expect GPU performance to leap forward much more before then (AMD being more likely to focus on efficiency for the time being). Any GPU you buy should at least be packing 4GB of memory, as the new consoles are running with 16 times the memory they did previously in game assets are finally catching up to where GPU performance is. I've frequently seen a lot of newer releasing going past 2gb and 3gb of memory usage and I suspect this trend will probably increase (hell the Star Citizen client can chew up over 4GB if your running past 1080p).

You're fine. CPU upgrades as far as games are concerned are marginal at best. Unless you are doing something super CPU intensive like video/photo rendering or audio mixing, it's not a problem. any i5 or i7 processor made within the last 5 years or so is just fine, especially if you overclock (they are awesome for overclocking. Like, 1Ghz or more overclock!)

I understand the criticizing of the term Future Proofing, @pcorb. That's why I also tried to define it as 'head room'. What my beginning post was asking for, was advancements say 6 months or so out I should be aware of before I do a PC build. As I said in the first post, I will make other decisions myself pertaining to performance and value. But if there was a hot sounding CPU, memory, anything coming out, I wanted (for once) to know about it. And I took note of what you had to say about multicore. I think Shadow of Mordor claimed it wanted a recommended 8 cores, but my first generation i7 4 core did just fine. Someone else stated 8 cores for 4K was going to become a norm...idk honestly.

And I already do have a new Nvidia card @anywhereilay and was not asking about that...BUT... there is an irony brought up by@apothaeos that I threw away money by trying to brute-force evolving video card demands for meeting 4K.

And I appreciate all what I have read. People just don't have just opinions, people into PC builds tend to understand gaming PC goals, components, and they stay abreast of what is around the corner. This has proved to be a good idea for me by asking here.

Most true thing ever said about computer building right there. There is no point in waiting to build a PC, if you need one now, and have the cash to do it now, then you should do it now.