ramDrive maybe?
virtual machines?

for what it’s worth:

nvidia just announced some pascal cards. the gtx1070 releases june 10th, has an MSRP of 380 USD and is a tad under the titan x in sheer computing power. depending on optimisation, it could outperform it in some scenarios. that sounds like pretty good value to me, and a tough nut for AMD’s upcoming polaris to beat.

CPU: intel, and i’d rather not go lower than an i5. only bother with the unlocked ones if you want to overclock.

mainboard wise: look at and compare the features of the chipsets for what you need (only bother with the Z170 if you want to overclock), then choose a board from those with your preferred chipset according to feature set, budget, and form factor. it might be wise to restrict yourself to the top few manufacturers. asus, gigabyte, msi. (asus tends to be pricy for conservative features, i’ve found msi to make the occasional really weird choice, features wise)

hard drives: having vs not having an SSD might be the most instantly noticeable thing you can do for performance. no need to go big or m.2 anything – i’m dualbooting from a 250gb samsung 850 evo and i have ridiculous amounts of space to spare right now. if you want to keep budget low, get a sub-200gb evo or comparable – the budget ssd market is pretty strong right now.

for data storage, get a 1–2 tb platter drive from a manufacturer you trust/got good reviews for longevity. hard drives are easy to upgrade/add later, so no need to account now for the storage requirements of the next 4 years.

case: no need to spend outrageous money on a case, but i’d make it a point of not skimping too much. the case can easily be the most long term investment of the whole thing, and building in a good, comfortable case is much nicer than mucking about in a crappy one. believe me, i went for the cheapest that looked ok a few years ago (and after i repainted it, it looked pretty good), but have been fighting the damn thing ever since.

and do yourself a favour and build the thing yourself. there’s more potential for mistakes in a medium sized lego set than there is in assembling a desktop computer, and i can’t imagine anyone’s going to do it for free unless there’s some catch.

if you go at it with some sense, i think you should be able to get a computer in the 1–1.5 k USD range that will keep you happy for a good while. especially so if you don’t feel the need to be at the bleeding edge of ultra settings in the newest games at all times.

not sure why you're making the case so hard for Piledriver. a newer chip, with a newer platform, with a shit-ton more performance potential when overclocked, with 4 less logical cores, performs roughly the same as an older chip, on an older platform, with 4 extra logical cores, in this specific use case. at around that time, those two chips could be had about the same price.

why would anyone want to buy the 8350? why would anyone, a year later?

and while piledriver might match the i5 there, largely due to CDPRED's well executed thread model, try any Blizzard game.

application having no impact is completely false. application is the source of the majority of the variance. it entirely matters how the application is built to determine how well it will run.

and yes, the fx pipeline is long, but it isn't exceptionally long, and carries with it the high branch misprediction penalties just like the Pentium 4 did. besides that, Intel's chips since Nehalem have had a better front-end to the cores and their op-decoders lessen the time they need to work by implementing fusion of some ops before the decoding stage. AMD hadn't done this as of Piledriver, maybe because they couldn't or didn't have the time or something. and result is that two int cores share a decoder with reduced single-thread potential than Intel's.

coming away from technicals for a second, I've seen enough benchmarks to know that, depending on game engine, you're gonna go from negligibly less performance to not-insignificantly less performance with FX. you're also gonna use more juice, have no platform support of PCIe gen3, m.2, sata express, usb 3 (usually they add a third party controller).

So what I'm saying is, yes, they're good chips, I know they're good chips, but the have issues. As time goes on, those issues only get bigger. And you shouldn't get them, if you don't what you're doing.

Sooo...

I went out and splurged a bit.
I got the 960, 16 gigs of DDR4 ram, I5 processor, 250 gig SSD.. yea I got what I wanted lol.
I was going to go with a custom build but.. really, it all came out to roughly the same price as a pre-built one. It even has a 550 watt power supply.
Got home, booted it up and WOW is this thing FAST. Like, blindingly so.
Thank you for all the work you guys did in helping me choose the stuff I wanted. It really did not go to waste because I knew exactly what I wanted and the price I was willing to pay.