Gonna build a new PC for digital painting–what specs do you recommend?

[Mechanizoid]

No problem man. I don't know much about PC building yet so take any suggestions I make with a grain of salt, but it was fun playing with that budget limit. And best of luck with the new PC! So the guys are gonna assemble it for you? That's cool, building it yourself would be fun but this saves time for your work.

Your build looks good to my inexperienced eye, nice choice of processor. Couldn't stand to stay with an i5 I see, lol. Heard good things about the Gigabyte boards but haven't looked into them much yet myself. Based on what little I know it sounds like this build will fit your requirements quite well.

In terms of your questions....I haven't researched in depth the benefits of gaming gpus vs quadro. To be honest, if you are just doing basic 3d and learning, I wouldn't worry too much about it. The gtx 960 I got has 1024 cuda cores, compared to 384 for my quadro k1100m. And 4gb ram, and higher bus and clock speed, so I'm pretty sure it will outperform my quadro by a bit. I can let you know how it goes when it is up and running if you like, but there are tons of benchmark scores out there to compare these kind of things. I think the 970 is a decent choice.

You're probably right that I don't need to worry too much about the GPU. I'll be doing basic 3d and painting mostly. I'm still going to research this further to understand the difference better.

I've been looking at both Quadro and Firepro cards, and I find that there are some decent midrange cards that will be within my budget. In particular the Quadro K2200 (640 CUDO cores, 4gb vram) and the Firepro W5100 (768 stream processors, 4gb vram). The Firepro is about a 100 USD cheaper than the Quadro, but I'm not sure how it compares or (vitally) how it performs under Linux. And I'm still researching the meaning of all the specs.

What I know so far is the that workstation cards have these advantages:
- Better drivers for working with 3d professional software
- Greater reliability rather than gaming performance
- Support for 10 bit colors
- Much higher precision calculations (probably not as relevant to what I do)
- Short on power consumption compared to gaming cards

with these cons
- Much higher price to performance
- Not as good for gaming (but I don't play games LOL)

The gaming cards have the advantage of much better price to performance and (duh) games, but leave out those pro features and consume more power and generate more heat. So for situations where the pro drivers and features help, the Quadros and Firepros will be better, but for situations where raw power determines the outcome the gaming cards may outperform an equivalently priced workstation card. There are benchmarks out there, so I will check those out to understand this further before investing in anything. But if I'm only working on it and don't need games, I'll definitely take a close look at the workstation cards.

Anyway I should get the box in a few days, but still need to source the monitor and do the drudgery of installing os and programs yet again...sigh. only other decision to be made is whether to dual boot linux and win 8.1, or go full linux again.

How did Linux work out for your professional stuff? I'm planning on switching Linux like David Revoy did, it looks like a great way to have independence and a good bit of fun getting everything working. :D I know that there is a lot of software that isn't Linux compatible, but there seems to be alternatives for a lot of things (like GIMP and Krita for PS, Inkscape for Illustrator, Blender for 3d etc.).

Anyway, have fun figuring out everything for your new workstation! And do please tell me how things go with the Geforce once it is up and running. I have to get back to drawing right now, though. One thing I learned from Feng Zhou's podcast is that tools don't matter nearly as much as practice. I can practice with just a cheap pen and stack of paper, but no graphics card or drawing tablet will give me skillz. XD Enough CD for one day for me LOL!