Even if you don't care too much about graphics I highly recommend a med-end card that has high value (performance/money) so it lasts longer. I think a GTX760 is good and I would also advise against the i3 so most definitely pick a decent i5, preferably with 4 cores so it's future proof in case you don't want to upgrade as often.

No no no. If you have a 3GHz i3 CPU, you have two cores running at 3GHz. Turbo boost does mean that the CPU can run higher with fewer cores used, but the difference is small (for example the i5 4690 runs at 3.5GHz at standard and 3.9GHz when boosting[/url].

The main difference between an i3 and i5 is that the i5 has 4 cores, while the i3 has two cores with hyperthreading, which shows up as 4 cores in the OS but is slower in practice.

Core i3 is indeed slower than an i5 for gaming, especially for modern games which can take advantage of many cores, but it's still perfectly serviceable. (Example benchmarks.)

Well, thank you for the education! I had a complete misunderstanding on how that all worked. I'll link here in my above post as to not confuse.

Don't buy a GTX760 the performance/wattage ratio is poor. There'll be a high performance, low wattage offering from Nvidia before you know it and the GTX 760 will look like a dinosaur. Buy a high wattage GPU now and not only will it cost you more, it'll actually cost you measurably more to run.

This is almost exactly me as well! I'll be keeping an eye on this thread, as I sort of "fell out of the loop" when it came to GPU tech (I was lucky enough to guess my way to a card I've been very pleased with in my current machine!) but I'll probably be upgrading in the next year *cough Witcher cough;* it'll be good to get an idea of what I should be keeping my eye on as far as what's around now and what will be around in 6 - 8 months or so.

I got stuck using a crappy laptop recently so my mother brought home a computer from her work that was just collecting dust with a i3 sandy bridge that was probably $400 new. I dropped in a 750Ti and it runs great to hold me over till broadwell comes out. I just finished the new tomb raider game at 1080p on a mix of mid/high settings and the fps was smooth. The computer has just a cheapo 300 watt psu that is the standard for your white box computers.

Here is the one I got. Just search on google. I bought it off amazon for $160.
MSI Computer Corp. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti Gaming OC 2GB GDDR5 VGA/DVI/HDMI PCI-Express Video Card N750TI TF 2GD5/OC

No; the 750Ti is a 5-module (750 is 4-module) chip. 640 shaders, where the 750 has 512. Neither is at all comparable to a 760, which is a much larger card.

Power supply is not critical with these cards; a first-rate 500-watt supply is far more than adequate. Leave the 850W jobs to people who are running high-power cards in SLI or have more money than ability to engineer computers.

Personally, I'm running a GTX 760, and everything I've thrown at it in ultra/1080p hasn't really even made it sputter. This includes both older and newer games: BF3, Witcher 2, New Vegas, etc, etc.

A 760 would probably tide you over for awhile, imo. The only thing I haven't tested is 1440p, because my monitor doesn't support it. :(

I got this card when it was first released because I only have a 300w psu and had been looking for something with very low power consumption but decent performance for ages (being a poor student I couldn't afford upgrading both psu and gpu). It's great for my needs currently, but clearly not the ideal card for witcher 3 when that comes out

Thanks for this discussion. It seems like an i5 is worth it if my budget can stretch that far but it's not essential, especially if I'm not using a higher end GPU.

You should think very carefully about future proofing. An i3 has enough grunt to play new games for a while, but will developers optimise properly? Probably not. My concern would be titles that arbitrarily 'need' four cores, given the specs of COD Ghosts (arbitrarily needs 6bg ram) this scenario could be a possibility. You would be safest getting a mid range i5.

I'm looking to the 'next gen' hoping it will provide true multi core scaling, as well as better use of hyper threading, essentially I'm hoping i7's will get used fully! So far I only know of one game that actually demonstrably utilises hyper threading, and it does so very well. I suspect many more games may benefit but am yet to see comparative benchmarks.

As someone who uses an i3 2120 in their gaming rig, you shouldn't be outright perturbed by performance concerns. People always think you need more power than you do whether it's gaming, editing or even sodding photoshop. The i3 pumps out a steady 60fps in basically everything I own (minus the odd strategy game). I would normally recommend it, but given the concerns I mention above the only truly safe option is a quad core cpu.

I got a 750 TI recently and have been happy with it. I don't expect it to be able to run new games on the highest of settings in a year or so, but I think they will still look very good and play smoothly. Which is exactly what I was looking for in my price range. Power usage was also a concern to me as I didn't have the money to buy a new PSU or build an entire new system.

As long as you don't mind turning a few settings down for the most demanding games, it should be fine. I expect to be able to run Witcher 3, but I'm not expecting all High or Ultra settings.

Yeah that's what I'm thinking about. And the rest of your post makes sense. I think I'm at the place where an i5 would be ideal but in the end it'll come down to what else I can afford to compromise on.

Your perspective seems similar to what I was thinking. I don't need the latest and greatest graphics and I'm very much used to turning down the graphics settings. At the end of the day I'm on a budget and I'm never going to get a Tri-SLI Titan setup or whatever.

One thing I am interested in is having a smaller form factor desktop PC and I'm willing to compromise a little on components to achieve this within my budget. However, I don't want to make too many compromise, hence me making this topic :)

From experience, smaller is okay, but do NOT go slimline. I made that mistake on my last rig and NEVER again. Just adding RAM was an experience in skinned knuckles and having to entirely remove brackets in some cases.
Eurgh. lol