Some of you guys know about
my new build - a triple-monitor research and statistics computer that will be doing double/secondary duty as a photo and video editing machine.
The specs (that I am 95% sure on) are as follows:
.
1) Why are you choosing the 3.5Ghz E3-1241V3 vs.
i7 4790K that boosts to 4.4Ghz out of the box with a minimum guaranteed clock speed of 4Ghz?
2) Why are you buying into an outdated architecture, outdated chipset H97, when Skylake launches August 5th, with USB 3.1, Ultra.M2 32GB/sec PCIe 3.0 x4 (some boards will have 2 of these), Thunderbolt 3, upgraded audio?
3) You are getting 32GB of DDR3-1600 - outdated RAM that can't be reused for future CPU upgrades over the next 3-5 years. For example, at least you'll probably be able to reuse DDR4-2400/2666 for Icelake in 2018. However, this 32GB of DDR3 is going to be unusable for next gen CPU roll-over.
The price premium for DDR4 vs. DDR3 is not that large anymore.
32GB DDR4-2133 =
$180
32GB DDR4-2666 =
$250
With 4x8GB sticks, there is still room for more RAM down the line if necessary too. Plus this DDR4 can be reused in the future if you decide to upgrade/swap X99/Skylake in 3-4 years.
4) What about your SSD/M.2 drive choice? You
can't have a modern/fast system with a mechanical HDD as the backbone for your OS. With a mechanical drive, your multi-purpose productivity PC is basically an anchor. Did you allocate enough budget for this component?
5) If you aren't gaming, I suggest waiting for GTX950 series August 17th. It'll cost you less and use less power. Since you aren't gaming, might as well that save $ and invest the savings from a lower videocard towards a faster CPU (or better yet the Skylake platform). Don't forget that Skylake-S/K series themselves will have a GPU inside that could be used as an option for video encoding/decoding. In addition to that, you may not even need a GTX950/960 videocard if you use the Skylake IGP.
Either way, I think it makes sense to wait until August 5th to see how well Skylake does for video encoding/decoding and photo editing. In Photoshop for example, Skylake's preview benchmarks crush Haswell.
Intel also highlights new video decoding/encoding IGP capabilities:
6) As a side-note to Skylake, you should also strongly consider stepping up to a 5820K if you are going to be using your machine for photo/video editing. Among the choices on hand (4790K, Skylake i7-6700K and 5820K OC), your CPU processor choice doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Maybe you could explain it better? For example a 5820K @ 4.5Ghz + 16GB DDR4 + GTX950 will be a better video editing machine than what you have chosen. Certaintly 6700K will crush that 3.5Ghz Quad-core Haswell as well for not much more $.
Look at what other people are assembling for video editing:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2441523