Help me decide what to buy

Whats up everyone!

Taxes are here and i've decided i'm making my long awaited purchase for a new rig. I'm debating heavily between Digital Storm and Cyberpowerpc. I'm looking to stay on around a $1000 budget. I also do some graphics work, and audio production in Ableton. I was looking at going with a Vanquish level 2. Will the i3 be able to handle that kind of workload + gaming and is the given power supply adequate enough? Also, for games like Diablo 3, DayZ, Rust, Battlefield 4, CS etc. how well will the PC perform? Is investing in an i3 kind of like investing in an obsolete processor now that the i7 is available?

Any and all tips appreciated as I just want to ensure I get the most bang for my buck.

-Cody

I don't recommend an i3, especially for gaming. If you're running a gaming rig, an i5 is where you want to be. Games typically don't support hyper threading, but they do support multi core and you'll get the best performance out of an i5. There is little to no gain between an i5 and i7 on gaming, but quite a difference in performance between an i3 and an i5.

You need to decide on a couple of things. An i5 offers great multi-tasking also. You can have youtube/netflix/facebook, etc... running while you have your game going. Open 20 or 30 tabs, get your game going and your cpu can do it. It might be at 75% or higher, but it can do it... just make sure you have the memory.

Now do you want to stream? Do you want to encode video from your epic moments? i5's can give you a solid 720p streaming without special trans-coding (assuming you don't have partnership with twitch). i7's can give you 1080p. i5's can encode a 10minute 1080p video into mp4/avi format is ~45m-1hour (depending on layers) where as an i7 can do it in about 20m-30m.

See the difference. I, personally, recommend against the i3. Spend the extra $$ and get at least an i5, 16gb of ram, and a decent card. Thankfully for you, GTX 760's are killer cards even for the price. So no need to drop $500 on a GTX x80 card when the x60's are amazing performers.

I swear bprat... you're like the robin to my batman at times... (or vice versa for me to you).

The Bro Code goes strong on the DS forums.

I agree with both bp22 & meller - the L2 will work but the improvements of the L3 are more than worth the price of admission...