The reason it bogs down isn't your CPU, but rather your disk drive. Getting a better disk drive (like an SSD) will help.

A good setup is a small SSD to hold the OS and a bigger HDD to hold your games and data. With this setup:
*: Your computer will boot much faster, and will become usable much faster after login. This is a huge difference.
*: When updating the OS, it will not take nearly as long. Furthermore, because SSDs can handle more I/O operations per second, the system won't bog down so badly.
*: When installing software to the HDD, the HDD will be busy. However, because it isn't constantly writing to the drive the OS is stored on, the OS won't have to compete with the installer for disk access, and as a result, it won't bog down (unless you're trying to run another program stored on the HDD at the same time, of course).

As a general recommendation, try to get a decent up-to-date mainboard and processor, and maybe a fairly powerful ( and high quality ) power supply unit. Those are important, since they are the basis for possible future upgrades, and generally a pain to upgrade/ replace later on. Adding more RAM or a more powerful graphics card in the future is pretty easy. 1000-ish dollars should easily be enough for the kind of performance you have in mind. Not at all. You only need a medium-range gaming PC to run a game like Witcher 3 reasonably smooth. And that's at 1080p, which OP says isn't even necessarily required.

I have no tips that have not been said in this thread already, but once it is built... play older games and max the crap out of antialiasing and anistropic filtering. Kinda rad playing something like Unreal or even Deus Ex with 32xCSAA. Yeah it has been possible for a while but having a powerful rig ensures being able to do that.

I have the MSI GTX 960 4G, and in Witcher 3 I have better performance than the PS4 version of the game. ( Higher FPS, slightly higher visual quality. ) So if that sounds good enough to you, then it's a fairly price-efficient GPU solution. ( At least on the NVIDIA side of things. ) When I bought mine, I mostly wanted a GPU which could keep up with the "next gen" consoles, so I'd be able to play any major cross-platform releases. So far it hasn't disappointed me in any way.

If money is a factor, here's a few tips:

Avoid SSDs - They're really fast but they help lower prices of regular hard drives now.

DO buy a dependable and fast (RPM) hard drive SATA III--don't settle for a cheap brand that might crash and lose all your data.

DO make sure the motherboard supports SATA III

DO splurge on 16 MB RAM (but 8 is OK, too. You can always upgrade to more later down the road)

Focus on AMD processors and Radeon graphics cards - Why? Purely budgetary.

Remember to add in items in your budget such as peripherals (keyboard, mouse, cables, etc.)

Don't forget to factor in cost of operating system (if needed) or any software.



Also, for less hassle, use sites like newegg that have a DIY section on combo purchases of components. This takes out the guesswork of any compatibility issues or whether your case will fit your components, and may also give you some good deals on items on sale or any rebate offers.


Oh, and why are you asking this here?!?!? =P

I got the 960, but sadly not the Witcher 3. But I can tell you that I can run almost anything at 1080p with high/very high settings, tweaking options like filters.

Keep in mind I don't usually play the latest games though. But if you don't mind lowering the details a little, this card is fine for running everything between 40-60 FPS.

If you can afford it, you should get the 970, as it is far more powerful and, most important, if you like to play modern AAAs, it will be more up to it longer. But as for now, the 960 will be enough, although it might get outdated faster.

About brands, I got the ASUS one. I think that it has a good price with a good cooling and design, not being too long though.

buy a cheap old used videocard to get you going for 2-3 months until the new 16nm cards are coming (pascal, polaris)
anything above gtx950-960 is throwing money away

that's more than enough

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-systems/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html

In theory it's enough. You can do a lot with very little ram, but the sheer scale of projects is ridiculous anymore. 8 & 16 bit machines used to run databases, certainly you can't store that much in memory at the same time, but management of data, compression and small footprints of data kept things fairly small. C was even programmed where you could specify a number of bits that a variable had to help optimize for size.

I wrote an assembler in 16bit x86 assembly, which used about 300k of memory to run. (multiple segments, 1 for the program, 1 for reading/writing, 1 for extra new instructions/segments, 1 for labels, numbers and keeping track of variables, all 64k limited). It's quite amazing what you can write with so little memory. I think I had a compression program written in 2k or less, I'd have to pull up my sources to see how big it was (not optimal compression, but it did some, lightning fast too).

Don't buy any current GPU yet, it seems nVidia consumer Pascal is just around the corner:
GeForce Tune-In: nVidia Livestream May 6th At 6pm PST On Twitch

If nothing else, that oughta bring down prices for the perfectly-capable current generation of cards.

OOPS! Sorry, I meant 16Kb. =P

Now we're getting somewhere! 6502 8-bit instructions where basic programs were written with as little as 4k for you to work with...

You can still do a lot with 16k, however it is seriously limiting what you can work on/scan/do with what's actively in memory.

The Arduino Uno, which is a device you can easily purchase, has only 2k of SRAM and 1k of EEPROM. That's not much to work with.

(Well, it *does* have 32k of flash memory, but that's read-only and mostly used to store the actual program. Even then, 32k is still tiny by modern standards; even the Commodore 64 had more memory!)