need help with another build

Rufftimes

Hey gang! 

Since the first build went so well, my oldest son is now sniffing at an upgrade. He's got about a $1500 budget, tax in Canadian. Check newegg.ca. So anyways, I've been an AMD fanboy since my first build, but my understanding is they are so inefficient and lagging behind now, that I'm thinking of an intel build. I picked him up a white NZXT source 340 case and a Raijintek Triton 240 liquid cooler, seeing as how he's going with a white/blue theme. The trition has clear hoses and comes with blue dye so it should look slick!

Thing is, I don't know much about intel heirarchy so I'm looking to pick some brains. I'm thinking of either of the devils canyon chips depending on budget, and a MSI z97 gaming board. I have no idea what to put in for ram

Aside from that, a 512gb SSD and a 1tb HDD. 

I've had good luck with 2 EVGA supernova power supplies, but I'm thinking he might like one with braided cables, preferably in blue or white. He wants a build he can really show off.

As far as GPU, I'm a huge ATI/AMD fanboy, but since it's not my build I'm open to hear about lame Nvidia cards as well....lol

 

 

Any suggestions we can throw into this thing to make it the most badass build for the bucks?

Quizzical

On that budget, I'd probably grab a Core i7-4790K and plan on keeping it just shy of forever.  It could easily still be a legitimate, high end gaming CPU five years from now.  As you said, Intel CPUs are a lot faster than AMD at the moment.  AMD is still a good budget option for a lot of people, but $1500 doesn't relegate you to picking the cheaper budget option on everything.

A GeForce GTX 980 is the fastest card on the market now.  If you like AMD, it's not hard to justify a Radeon R9 290X, as it's somewhat slower than the GTX 980, but it's not a lot slower and it sure is a lot cheaper.

I'd check NCIX, not just New Egg Canada.  New Egg charges a lot to ship to Canada because they're shipping across a country border.  NCIX offers a lot of good deals and is based in Canada so it's likely to be cheaper for you when shipping to Canada.

I wouldn't be too wedded to getting a 512 GB SSD.  The difference between a 256 GB and no SSD at all is huge, of course, but the difference between 256 GB and 512 GB is about the same on price but a lot less in practical utility.  It's also easy to buy another SSD and plug it in later without having to pull out the old one if he decides he wants more SSD capacity.  That said, if it fits the budget, go ahead.  This one is a good deal at $200 CAD today:

http://www.ncix.com/detail/crucial-m500-ct480m500ssd1-2-5in-480gb-57-81656-1265.htm

Rufftimes

I keep an eye on ncix as well, but I do have free shipping with newegg. I look at all the sites for deals. Are there traditionally great boxing day deals on computer hardware?