I am going to be building a computer for a college student. He is going into general engineering while he figures out exactly what he wants to do. The budget for this computer is about $1500 USD (just for the tower). This computer will be running Windows 10. He will be using this computer for school work and for gaming.He is hasn't decided if he wants to do any type of rendering yet, so to be safe, lets assume he will be. The graphics card doesn't have to be a power renderer, just something to get the job done.Requirements:Must be the latest generation of GPU chips. I would like this to last as long as possible for him.Can play most modern games on at least medium settings.Can help him with at least some of his course work. (I do not know what programs he will use. I also do not know how intensive his work will be.)Support for two 1080p monitorsPCI Express 3.0 x16At least 2GB GDDR5Price < $800 USDIt would be nice to have it support two 4K monitors in case he wants to upgrade, but it is not a requirement.
Graphics card for new college computer
gaming;graphics cards;rendering
For under $800 you can get some pretty insane video cards. Ever since the Nvidia GTX 900 series came out, manufacturers have been cramming as much as they can into every product (and that's a good thing).EVGA GTX 980 Ti FTW (~$680)Maxwell GPU architectureSupports 4 monitors (max digital resolution: 4096x2160)6GB 384-bit GDDR5PCIe 3.0 16xClocks & cores: 1190MHz core, 1291MHz boost, 2816 CUDA CoresDVI-I, 3x DisplayPort, HDMIThis one will last for quite a long time considering its VRAM, clock speeds, and resolution support. It can play most PC games on very high or ultra settings.I strongly recommend EVGA's Nvidia cards. These things are monsters and they're all backed by tons and tons of positive ratings. Great build quality, great support, great everything.Workstation cards are made for rendering, but the problem there is that features are very restricted. For instance, the FirePro W7100 is a decent price and has more VRAM but it only outputs DisplayPort, has a smaller memory interface, and bandwidth is drastically lower. These are a few features that matter with non-workstations, and since you aren't sure if this will be used for rendering, the risk isn't worth it.