Hey, all. My current gaming set up is significantly out of date, or so the previous wave of Beta told me. I am going to be building from scratch a new desktop PC that will be capable of running ESO on max settings, and I was really hoping to get some of your input on this because honestly last time I just handed my money over to a friend and he did the selection/purchase/installation. I'd really love to keep the total price of parts around $1200 USD, but I'm willing to up that to $2000 USD if the price increase means putting off any necessary upgrades to stay at max settings for a few years. If anyone has any suggestions or any specs from a Skyrim set up that worked out well, please post! Haha, I gotta take advantage of these holiday season deals, right? Thanks in advance!

Also if anyone has any awesome-looking tower cases they wanna show off, feel free!

Unless you want to go above 1080p, I don't think ESO will be that demanding on ultra settings, and current mid range GPUs should be fine. Get a good up to date quad (or more) core CPU, because this tends to be the bottle neck in MMOs rather than the graphics card, especially with lots of players on screen. 8 GB RAM is the current minimum you should have and it's still relatively cheap. Something that can improve performance enormously by lowering loading times is an SSD (128 GB and up to have enough diskspace for your OS + ESO). Don't save on the PSU, get a good 80+ gold or even platinum one; make sure it has enough watt for your system, but anything above 600 usually isn't necessary nowadays. I don't know current market prices in $ but you should be able to stay at or even below your 1200 USD number.

Of course those are just general tips, would be easier to list specific components if you tell us what else you want to do with it or what's important to you. Lot's of options.

Hey even this general info is helpful to a rookie like me. Honestly the only other thing I would use this computer for is digital art (Wacom tablet & photo editing) but I have a laptop from college that I currently use that and MS Office things for and am not too concerned about it. All of the computers in my house use LCD TVs as monitors (we're weird lol), so unless we have a sudden addition to the team, yes the game'll be at 1080p. I'd be interested in hearing specific GPU suggestions if you have any, preferably high end. Ty for the help so far tho!

Honest question now do you want a gaming PC or buy a PS4/ Xbox1 ?

If you want a gaming pc I would aim for the AMD CPU 8 core the 8350 with the new ATI RX9 graphics cards because of the new Mantel software they use. (Its a new API that will not require DirectX to be used in games, this means PC games can have a Drawcall of 100,000 per frame running at over 60fps. Where as DirectX can only manage a mere 2000-3000 drawcalls a frame. The new consoles can manage around 10,000 - 15,000 drawcalls because of their dedicated hardware architecture.) This will keep the gaming PC ahead of consoles for the next few years as more and more developers are ditching DirectX because Microsoft are forgetting about the gaming industry to concentrate on tablets and mobile platforms. That is if developer use Mantel over DirectX, I know DICE are and Nitrous along with a few more companies who make computer games. Now if Nvidia also use Mantel then it would really take off two major card manufactures using the same API software would mean better gaming performance all round.

I say AMD because although a bit slower than Intel (by a few miliseconds) They can handle games far better and are a lot cheaper than intel.

Don't go with AMD. I'm sorry, I know its the underdog company and people want to root for them, but it just isn't worth your money. Its barely cheaper than Intel for the same chip and you'll pay for it in performance.

I'd recommend the Intel Core i5 4570. It should be able to handle any game for the next ten years or so.

Only reason to get more cores would be if you plan to do a lot of streaming while playing.

How loud do you want your PC to be?

Lol @ this Q. Also building this PC specifically because I don't want either/a console. I went from PC gaming to console gaming after a shift in social cliques but tbh I can't stand the Xbox community and our PS3 is only used in the context of "Turn on Netflix, I'm bored." I should have never betrayed you, Steam! To think of all the sales I missed!! :'(

Thank you for the very specifc "AMD CPU 8 core the 8350 with the new ATI RX9 graphics cards"! I will definitely look into this guy.

Don't care, tbh. Noice cancelling head set?