Notes

Here is what I personally would do with about $1,500 and why. At the end of this is a link to a YouTube playlist that shows game-play on this CPU/GPU combo. Make sure you set the quality all the way up:

CPU - the i7 is great, but you would notice only a couple of frames difference between it and the i5-6600k - especially overclocked - when it comes to gaming. The i7 is more for video editing and rendering than gaming and general use. The 6600k is unlocked, can be overclocked easily to at least 4.0GHz - 4.5GHz, and won't bottleneck the graphics card.

Cooler - The H60 doesn't look as 'cool' as the 240mm or 360mm radiators, but it's still liquid cooling and costs almost half as much. Replacing the stock fan with an LED one makes it pop anyway.

Motherboard - Z170 chipset all the way. The Krait edition colors are nice and won't conflict with your RGB lighting, so any color, any mood, the build will look sexy.

Memory - 16GB is plenty for gaming. 8GB is the actual standard today for gaming systems, so 16GB is double the standard. You can always buy another set of this memory to up to 32GB later on.

Storage - 240GB SSD for Windows and a 2TB HDD for games/media. SSD will make the system run incredibly fast compared to HDD systems you're used to.

Graphics Card - The 1060 is the perfect balance right now of performance to $. $280 for a 6GB card that can play any title out right now and will continue to play new releases for years (at 1080 monitor resolution). The combination of CPU and GPU you'd have here will have you VirtualReality ready, and with the 2560x1080 monitor you have in this build your gaming will be fine for years.

Case - This case is beautiful. Honestly, the $140 price-tag is a chunk of the budget; $50 cases do the same thing. But the tempered glass side-panels and RGB fans included make this case look phenominal. Great air-flow, so your components should run cool. Decent cable-management so we can hide the mess of cables.

Case Fans - 3x static-pressure 120mm RGB fans should sync with the front RGB fans of the case to make a nice light show without over-doing it like LED strips can (the way my case is illuminated). We put two on the top of the case, one on the rear with the 120mm liquid cooler. At $20 each, this part of the build is not necessary, but will keep the system cool while helping it look great.

Monitor - IPS panel, 5ms response time, 75Hz refresh, 2560x1080 resolution. Great for gaming at this price-point.

OS - We use a cracked version of Windows 10. You can buy it for $30 usually from keysites like Kinguin, but we can shave that even further by just using a cracked version of Windows. You can still fully update it and use anti-virus with it, so unless your moral compass compells you to pay for the OS, we'll use it cracked.


https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvqIGXCkIp_WL9KP2LfcqejD7OjiPfaOI