Getting prepared for 4K gaming

Welcome gents, tonight I think a discussion of 4K for both newbs, like me, and more experienced people would be good.

Mainstream 40' panels of 4K/1080 quality are the same price now. And now even we're getting 200mhz refresh/1ms on anything for cheap, it's nice and it's unfortunate that the hardware wasn't as potent as it was back in the days. We are seeing the beautifully tuned overclocking 9XX series Nvidia maxwell gen and the r9 from AMD and lately we have got some nice new cards such as the 980/ti, with the new Fury series and the refreshed 390/x series.

So personally, I have to decide. The 980ti aircooled is $1400 which is not worth it, so I can decide between..

The 980 has a chance at $900, which is an EVGA. The 390x with Crossfire later on, at $800, which is a Sapphire. I can also see the Asus poseidon 980, which will have a watercooled loop fitted to it and significantly overclocked, at $1100 NZD (would this performance be quite likely to the 980ti? Is 4gb enough on a Maxwell for 4K?).

Or the r9 390 Strix duc3 which I will wait out for, should be $650. I will most likely crossfire being $1400 with a 900w PSU.....Unfortunately SLi/Crossfire has issues - which I'm sure some opinions of for newbs like me, would be helpful.
As far as I'm concerned, I've had the most shocking and unforgivable Nvidia driver errors, SLi will not happen in my situation but single card for 1-2 years/sell/buy latest could do.

So I'm deciding for the $1100 poseidon/$1400 r9 390s crossfire with the 900w PSU, what are your opinions. Another common topic of point; will these r9 390s going to suffocate in this enclosure.

As you can see, with a 3 slot card I'm going to need Asus Strix dcu3 as it's 2 slots which I won't mind at all :P The blue lane you can see under the card is the other PCI-E 16x

Overclocking wouldn't happen which would stunt these non-x variants even more. This is a big downside to getting the crossfire, no overclocking.

So I'll wrap this up. Will I need to be looking at minimum 2x390xs/2xfurys/2x980tis to have an enjoyable time? From what I understand so far crossfire r9 390s will have issues but be exceptional performance in titles (most modern AAA/AAs?) that support it. The Crossfire setup looks future proof and the 980 Poseidon will be an adventure on its own while avoiding sli crossfire. This is why I'm considering the poseidon.

"We were able to take the GPU now to 1530MHz Boost Clock which translates to a real-world in-game frequency of 1580MHz! This is the highest stable overclock we've ever achieved on a GeForce GTX 980 GPU based video card. That is 80MHz faster with liquid cooling, but the best part? The GPU temperature never exceeded 50c under liquid at 1580MHz."

Big decisions ahead. Thanks for your time and any input on this situation.

Depends on which games you play. I currently have two 980Tis and game at 4K.

If you want to max out the most GPU hungry games at 4K at 60+fps, you are going to need at least two Fury/Fury X/980Tis/ Titan X. But the vast majority of games will just do fine with just one card.

That case seems too small to fit a pair of 390X/390 without removing or cutting that hard drive trays.

I would recommend getting a R9 Fury if you can find it for a good price. If you can go higher, then a 980 Ti. I wouldn't buy a 980 at this point.

Also, cable management.

Something to think about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK8Gc512nwM

@rawrrrson moved to hardware forum

Personally I wouldn't go with anything smaller than 50' when talking about 4k resolution, the recommended from many sites is 55'+.

2x 390s should do excellent job in that resolution.

The most important thing is vram. if you have less than 4gb its not even worth doing, and keep in mind that crossfire and sli do not stack vram. It uses whatever the primary cards vram is.

@rawrrrson: I really feel that it's still a bit too early to shell out the cash for 4k gaming. For one thing, modern high-end GPU's still fall behind when pushing so many pixels. Even the top of the line GPU's can be hit or miss when gaming at 4k resolution. GPU's are just not quite there yet in my humble opinion to reliably push 4k.

Second, prices for anything 4k and/or the GPU's you would need to game in 4k resolution are absurdly expensive. If you're able to wait, maybe 1-2 years, 4k will eventually become a very viable upgrade and prices will become much more reasonable. At the moment, 4k gaming is absurdly expensive to get up and running. And even then, you may just find out that it's not quite running up to snuff. For viable 4k gaming, be prepared to shell out cash for expensive, multiple, high-end GPU's along with the high costs of quality 4k monitor(s) and high-end PC components.

TL;DR -- I would wait just a little longer still to make the jump to 4k gaming. Maybe consider 1440p in the meantime.

common 4k is for the peasant race

buy a 21:9 3440x1440 monitor instead