 Last year's Holiday Buyers Guide was a big success for us, and between Black Friday and the holiday shopping season rolling around, the release of hot games like Assassin's Creed Unity, our performance guide for which is coming soon, so make sure you're subscribed, and the requests for me to do another one, well all of that added up to, I guess it's time to drop another Holiday Buyers Guide on y'all. Corsair Gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB keyswitches for 16.8 million color-per-key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization. Click now to learn more. Just like last year, I'll be addressing three different price points, under 500, around 1,000, and around 2,000 before the cost of Windows, with three different sets of recommendations and rationale for the parts that I chose. Pricing is pulled from a combination of Newegg.com and Amazon.com, with a sanity check at NCIX.com to make sure that it's not wildly more expensive at, you know, who knows, some other place. So we'll start with Just Game. This system isn't powerful enough for heavy use outside of, you know, day-to-day general use and 1080p gaming, and doesn't try to sell itself based on future-proofness. The CPU was the toughest decision here because AMD's 750K quad-core and Intel's G3258 dual-core are both similarly priced, overclockable, and can run on cheap motherboards, so it came down to the design philosophy for the system. The best performance right now. And even though AMD's quad-core design might give it the edge in future games, the Intel chip gets the nod today, thanks to its better single-threaded performance and lower heat output when overclocked, which will allow us to turn its speed up a fair bit, even with the basic included cooler. The motherboard only had to meet a couple of key needs. It had to support overclocking on the G3258, which it does with the latest BIOS, and it needed a PCI Express 16x expansion slot. Bingo. My RAM choice of a single stick of the cheapest DDR3 that I could find probably looks a little funny, since this CPU will benefit from a dual-channel configuration with two sticks. But while 16 gigs may be useful in the future, we don't really need it today, and my choice of a single 8 gig stick allows me to upgrade to 16 gigs later, without scrapping my existing memory, since my board only has two RAM expansion slots. The case and power supply choice was dictated by the available options, really, at this price point. Case and power supply bundles tend to be available at lower prices, but mostly junk, so I went with the only aggressively priced bundle SKU from a brand that I trust that I could find. The video card is where this rig can be a bit flexible. Based on regular prices and our target cost for the total system, the R7 260X is the clear winner, given its similar performance to the 750 Ti at 1080p in titles that we've tested recently, and its much lower price. Storage is where JustGame gets the biggest upgrade since last year, thanks to the plummeting prices of SSDs in the last year, and we went with a 120 gig Kingston V300 SSD, man that thing is cheap, and a WD 1TB green drive for mass storage and games. So in summary, JustGame is very similar to last year's model with a couple of key differences. It's got similar gaming performance, but now it gets USB 3, albeit not in the front, and a much better storage solution, which I'd really recommend keeping in, or even bumping up to a 2TB drive if you have a big game library. But, you also have the option to take out the hard drive or go just hard drive rather than having an SSD as well, and then dumping that money back into the graphics card where an R9 270 would be a worthy upgrade. Our second system is GameNow. Similarly to JustGame, we didn't worry ourselves about performance tomorrow, but unlike JustGame, we really avoided skimping in areas where we felt like we were losing 20% of the potential performance to save 10% of the cost. This one is all about bang for the buck. The CPU was another tough call here. I wish Intel had something a lot more competitive in this price range, because between the Pentium chip for 70 bucks and their entry-level K-series i5 for 240 bucks, they have nothing that over clocks. So for an enthusiast-oriented buyer's guide like this one, AMD wins at this price point for sure with their 6-core FX 6300. Now, my initial plan was to go with a motherboard that supported SLI, but I scrapped that when I did my philosophy check and realized that I was spending about another $40 on a feature that I wasn't using today, and so we went with the M5A97, a very well-proven product. For RAM, I went with 16 gigs of HyperX Fury 1866 MHz DDR3, but I could easily swap that out with a comparable product from another trusted brand like Corsair or G.Skill. I added the extra capacity, though, because while, strictly speaking, games might not need more than 8 gigs today, web browsers also need to run well on gaming machines, and if you're a tab fiend like me, you might enjoy the extra breathing room that a bit more system memory affords you. The power supply was another component where I picked out something much more expensive than cut it down dramatically when I realized that I was spending too much. This power supply might not really look like anything special, but it will handle our CPU and GPU just fine, as long as we don't plan to upgrade them. An aftermarket cooler to give us more overclocking headroom is a must on this chip, thanks to its 6 processing cores and decidedly last-gen efficiency, but thankfully there are great choices for around $30, and this one will take care of our chip nicely. For the case, we went with the same one that we used for our Kaveri build guide about 6 months ago. It looks okay to my eyes, it has ventilation over the graphics card area, and it's reasonably easy to build and cable manage, so there you go. The graphics card is where we blew most of our money on this machine, but the GTX 970 is just a remarkable graphics card that single-handedly takes this from a budget box to a very competent gaming machine, and thanks to its power efficiency, it saves us a couple bucks on the PSU to boot. For storage, I feel like 250 gigs is the sweet spot for SSD capacity, where you can install programs and pictures, but not necessarily lots of games and videos on your boot drive without worrying about it too much, and this drive is well known to be reliable and is at a great price right now. We also added the best bang for the buck capacity of WD Green for secondary storage to go with it. The 3TB model costs twice as much as the 1TB and stores three times as much stuff. Yay. And then finally, we chucked in an optical drive, because it's only 20 bucks in, like, YOLO, right? All in all, GameNow actually has less raw CPU performance than last year's model, so if you had a few more bucks to spend, a power supply with some more room for upgrades or a better CPU might not be a terrible bet, but given the size of modern games, I stand behind the upgraded storage, and I felt like the better GPU was also a worthwhile trade-off for gamers too, and that's where that extra money went. Which leads us to GameOn, our 4K-capable gaming machine where we stressed less about saving a few bucks and focused more on having the best possible experience, well, but without completely losing track of the value proposition of the parts we were using. CPU was an easy choice this time. The Intel 4690K quad-core overclocks like a bat out of hell, and unless you torture it on purpose, features enough processing cores for any game and even medium-intensity content creation. For the motherboard, we went with a Z87A, because Z97 doesn't actually offer a tangible performance benefit, and the only thing we were really after here was support for CPU overclocking and support for SLI. Stepping up to a Pro model will give you more creature comforts like Wi-Fi, but we decided to allocate our budget a little bit differently this year. For RAM, I didn't change anything from game now. 16 gigs is still enough for most people today, and you can chuck another kid in tomorrow if you feel like you need 32 at said time. And then for our power supply, we actually decided to splurge a little bit here, since we went with two graphics cards and a windowed but fairly small case. So we grabbed a fully modular power supply, which provides the benefit of helping things look tidy, since it's windowed, and even though it's not all about the bling-bling, you know, it doesn't hurt to have an expensive gadget look expensive rather than shoddy. Speaking of expensive, I blew over a hundred bucks on the cooler this time around, and there are a couple of reasons for that. One, this is an excellent cooler and will keep our CPU safe while overclocking, and two, is that in spite of its power, this is shaping up to be a pretty quiet machine, so I wanted something that wouldn't ramp up too hard even when gaming and would stay quite quiet. The case was an easy one. The Phanteks Enthoo Pro has the features and build quality of cases that cost much more, and it's compatible with all the hardware we need with ample cooling, and I think it looks fantastic. And then... where we spent again all the budget? The dual GTX 970 graphics cards that I squeezed into our $2000-ish price point. Now, I know what you're gonna say, Linus, you always say, single better GPU versus SLI lesser GPUs, and that's actually not what I always say. I always add, except sometimes. The 970 is one of those... sometimes. It's so similar in performance to its bigger brother, the 980, and so much less expensive, that two of them costs only about 20% more than a single 980, but will absolutely wreck the single-card solution in any games that scaled basically at all in SLI. For storage, we basically yoloed out and doubled the capacity of our previous choices, even though a 730 series SSD's performance benefit over the older 520 isn't that huge in the real world, and the 6TB green costs more than twice as much as the 3TB green. I mean, you gotta have... but you gotta have somewhere to store your stuff, though, right? Storage is very flexible. You could decide how you wanted to spend that money, but... there you go. And then finally, more yolo. We threw in a DVD burner again, just in case you want one. Which makes our Game On machine not only by far the fastest gaming rig in our buyer's guide, which, of course, I would hope it would be, since it's the most expensive, but also the most versatile. There are a couple things you could add, like stepping up to a Core i7 and doubling up on RAM if you really need the extra multi-threading and multi-tasking performance, but other than that, this is about as much as I'd recommend spending on a Mostly For Gaming tower that will deliver a great user experience across the board for a very long time. Speaking... of great user experiences for years to come, 5-4 Club is giving our viewers, that's you guys, a chance to participate in one of their most epic giveaways ever. They're offering 60 months, that's five years of their membership, absolutely free to one lucky winner in the continental US or Canada. If we're talking dollar values, that's $3,600 worth of 5-4 Club membership, as their service costs $60 per month for $120 worth of retail value of clothing, or more. So that's up to $7,200 of clothes, which is probably more than I've spent on clothing in my entire life. 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It's everything I just described, except you actually have to pay for it. Alright guys, thank you for checking out our Holiday PC Buyer's Guide 2014. I hope you enjoyed it. Like it and share it with your friends if you thought it was helpful. Leave a comment if you have any feedback on our hardware choices. We'd love to hear from you guys. And as always, check out the link in the video description if you want to help us out by contributing monthly or buying a cool t-shirt like the one I have, or the 5-4 one, either of those is okay, they both help us. And then, what was the other thing? Right, we're changing your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code, so we get a small kickback whenever you buy, say for example, PC components. Thanks again for watching and as always, don't forget to subscribe.