Budget build suggestions

[Quintana]

Budget: $500 (slightly past that is not a big deal).
Resolution: 1680x1050
Games/Settings Desired: World of Warcraft, Diablo III, Sims 3 (Sims 4 once released), high settings or equivalent with bells and whistles turned on.
Country: United States
Reusable Parts: Already purchased 8GB of RAM.
Already have the OS, and peripherals.

Putting this together for my sister, replacing her 7 year old desktop. Outside of gaming it will be used for general day to day tasks.

[torment3d]

Pick up a decent quality AM3+ motherboard (look to spend around $100 for an ASUS imo). Grab an FX-4100 for $99, a random ATX-mid tower case for $40, a Radeon HD6970 ($159.99 on sale on newegg right now, by far best value for the money), $80 for a 1-2 TB hard drive, and $15-20 for a random DVD burner. Total = $495-500. You're welcome!

EDIT: Crap, forgot power supply. Get one that's in the price range of $50-60 if you have to save money. You will need a minimum of 500w power. Make sure it has a 6-pin and a 6+2-pin power connector for the HD6970. Rosewill is a good value in power supplies without losing important quality in design. If you have to, you can skimp more on the motherboard and save like $30-50 but I would rather you save up another $50 and get the better one personally. I don't think links can be posted here but I will put the names of the products to save you some time. Search the names on newegg(dot)com, replace (dot) with an actual period.

Case: Choose your own depending on personal preference.
Power Supply: RAIDMAX HYBRID 2 RX-530SS 530W ATX12V V2.2/ EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready Modular Power Supply
Motherboard: ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
Processor: AMD FX-4100 Zambezi 3.6GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor
Hard Drive: TOSHIBA PH3200U-1I72 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
Video Card: Sapphire ATi Radeon HD6970 2GB
DVD-burner: Whatever you want, $15 approx.
Total: $525 shipped

[yurano]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i5-3470 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor ($190.29 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: MSI B75MA-E33 Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($54.99 @ NCIX US)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($59.99 @ NCIX US)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB Video Card ($159.98 @ Newegg)
Case: NZXT Source 210 (White) ATX Mid Tower Case ($24.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 500W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($29.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $520.23
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-07-26 23:46 EDT-0400)

[chazus]

You will need a minimum of 500w power

Incorrect. You don't.

Power Supply: RAIDMAX HYBRID 2 RX-530SS 530W ATX12V V2.2/ EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready Modular Power Supply

Terrible idea. A firecracker in a box.

Video Card: Sapphire ATi Radeon HD6970 2GB

No. A 650ti Boost is the same price, and better, and newer, and better. And half the power usage.

Pick the stuff Yurano selected. You'll be much happier, with much better performance, and much better quality parts.

[torment3d]

LOLhttp://www.hwcompare.com/13840/gefor...adeon-hd-6970/

[chazus]

LOLhttp://www.hwcompare.com/13840/gefor...adeon-hd-6970/

1) That's a 650ti, not a 650ti Boost. Before you go "LOL"ing, make sure you're actually comparing the correct hardware.
2) Even if it were the correct hardware (HWCompare doesn't even have the 650ti Boost listed.), comparing pure hardware stats such as "texel rate" doesn't actually mean something is better, or worse.
3) HWCompare is usually laughed at as a resource to compare anything outside of electrical power use.

I believe the LOL you were looking for is here, or here, depending on what game you want. At the exact same price (And not on sale), the 650ti Boost clearly a better choice in every situation. Lower power, same or better performance, newer tech.

Notably, there is also an MSI 650ti Boost on sale for $109 right now, which is an absolutely insane price.

[torment3d]

That is a nice price, no argument there. I'd buy it. One thing IMO though is adding mail-in rebates to the total price is kinda unfair because they take like 6-8 weeks to be paid and half the time you don't even receive them. The other thing about 500w power minimum not being true, the required wattage for the build I listed is 455w so a 500w power supply would be required... Other than that, I would confidently say that most of the time if you have the money for a specific nVIDIA card, whatever Radeon is equal in price will be 10-20% higher in performance.

Edit: http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-69...X-650-Ti-Boost

That's a much more fair comparison. If you dig through every benchmark, real-world test, and technical spec it breaks down like this... The Radeon HD6970 is better than the 650 ti Boost at EVERYTHING. The 650 ti Boost uses less power and is slightly quieter. I would never buy an nvidia gpu the way their price model is set up right now. It's funny, the article I listed has a section where it specifically states that BF3 is the only game that the 650 outshines the 6970 and that's the benchmark you listed.

[chazus]

The other thing about 500w power minimum not being true, the required wattage for the build I listed is 455w so a 500w power supply would be required...

The required wattage for that actually is more around 250, since it's not a system that will need stress testing. But besides that, that Raidmax 530 is (on paper) barely a 440w, and since it's Raidmax, it's more an explosive thana 440w. I'd probably a 300 at best.
Edit: http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-69...X-650-Ti-Boost. All of this is more reason to pick the lower power (By 100w!) card, so you don't need to worry over if your PSU, crappy raidmax or not, will supply enough.

That's a much more fair comparison. If you dig through every benchmark, real-world test, and technical spec it breaks down like this... The Radeon HD6970 is better than the 650 ti Boost at EVERYTHING. The 650 ti Boost uses less power and is slightly quieter. I would never buy an nvidia gpu the way their price model is set up right now.

GPUBoss is even more laughable than HWcompare, more often than not. First off, you're using settings the OP won't be using. 1920x1200 takes more demand than most standard resolutions, and the 6970 WILL do marginally better there! ...Except for the fact that the OP, and most people, don't use that resolution. If you actually did some real 'digging deep' on benchmarks (instead of clicking JUST the ones I listed, but their wide array of almost 25 games, rather than CPU based benchmarks) you'd see that at 1680x1050, the 650ti Boost is better in pretty much everything.

The 6970 is still a bad choice. It's funny that you say "Nvidia's GPU model" is bad, when nvidia is currently dominating almost every spot on the GPU market except for the ultra low end (Sub-$100) area.

[torment3d]

Your information is bad and you're attacking me as if you have personal stake in the company. This is why I don't post here.

[Quintana]

Sorry for bumping this a few days later, I completely forgot I posted this thread. Going off what yurano suggested would it make sense to go with the i5-4570 given it's the newest technology? I live near Microcenter and can get the 4570 for $160 and similar motherboard for $75, more or less spending the same amount of money but having a possible upgrade path.

[torment3d]

The 4570 is a good option if you are not planning on overclocking. It's equal in performance to the 3570k (the unlocked one you would wanna go with if you plan on overclocking) and costs a bit less. I wouldn't get a $75 motherboard though, you don't want blown caps and such. Even just $15-25 up will get you a much higher quality board.