Haswell has both energy savings and increased performance. Intel has also devoted much more resources to the integrated graphics in Haswell, however that is irrelevant when using a dedicated graphics card.
Question, does your friend expect to upgrade the GPU when the latest games demand more performance than a single 760 can muster, or SLI another 760 when they start dropping in price? If he is going to SLI, I would suggest going with a 750w high quality PSU. You can normally find a Seasonic or rebranded Seasonic like XFX for around $60 after rebate on sale.
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If it's not a price jump, try to go Haswell (4th generation of the current Intel architecture). You may want to nix the heat sink unless your friend plans on overclocking, because stock is usually sufficient unless you live in a very hot location or overclock. May also want to look at 16GB of RAM instead of 8, because with that graphics card RAM would be the bottleneck. Also, that power supply is a mite on the weak side, might want to go 550W plus.
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Haswell is about a 10% performance increase over IvyBridge, and has lower power usage. So you'd be better off going with the i5 4770k, which is barely any different in price.
Also, I agree with SquireZed about going with a slightly higher wattage PSU. Personally, I'd say to go for a 650W. The reason I say that is to ensure you have enough throughput for everything that is going to be connected, and not be nearing to maxing out your PSU. That may not be relevant anymore honestly, but it's still something I stick with, after having been building PCs for more than 15 years. People tend to skimp on PSUs, not realizing how important they actually are, or that a bad PSU purchase can result in frying all the other components that cost so much more.
I'd also agree with the suggestion that you look at a 16GB RAM kit instead of 8GB, considering that, as was pointed out, at 8GB RAM is going to become your bottleneck, and the extra RAM now will ensure you don't have to worry about putting more in in a year as things start sucking up more RAM. RAM needs have been going up in leaps and bounds, so it's a case of better safe than sorry, same as the PSU.
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Sure. Also a note for my initial post. I meant to say the i5 4670k, not the 4770k. The 4770 is slightly better still, but also $100 more expense.
Here's what I threw together. It's a touch over $1000, but after the MIRs are counted it's below $1k.
link
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Fond experiences with Mushkin primarily. I've had really good luck with their RAM, and it's generally better priced for lower latency, plus has a lifetime warranty.
I'm a sucker for a lifetime warranty.
*edit: I forgot to mention that I chose 4x4 over 2x8 for a reason: The same amount of RAM is slightly more efficiently accessed when in 2 (in this case 4GB) chunks on separate slots (even though both function from the same BUS channel) because it can access the available space on two different slots of the channel at the same time - In other words, 1 8GB stick is accessed as quickly as that 1 stick can work. Two sticks however, within the boundries of what the BUS itself can support, can be accessed simultaneously, which is generally then faster overall loading & unloading of the RAM. Primarily only really noteworthy in multitasking, but it's still what I default to. (Years ago, working with standard SD-RAM, rather than DDR SD-RAM, having both slots in each channel filled was required. So, you either used 4 DIMMs, or had to use these weird faux DIMM 'spacers' to fill the slot)
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I don't think it really matters these days... And it might not be really that straightforward from some answers around.
4x4 doesn't leave much room for upgrading also. But going from 16GB to 32GB shouldn't be required in near future. Unless you need to do some very specific tasks...
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My build
helping a friend to build a pc(US)
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