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Everything he said is valid, but heres the thing you never specified best pc for what. Gaming, Rendering, Modeling, ETC. If you would have specifically said just for gaming, then yeah i would have recommended an i5 with a GTX 980 and only 8 GB or ram. Your buddy is correct on that topic. But you didn't specify. If its for rendering or 3D modeling well that's where you would want an i7 with 16 GB of ram. so i basically took it upon myself to build the best pc i would personally build.

Edit: Decibels are off for your buddy, if he truly have a pc that quite it would be jaw dropping

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXZrWqCT7R0

no even people who build only quite pc's can get that low

PSU brand is sorta important. You dont want to buy a POS like an earthwatts vs a corsair or Seasonic. No point in dropping 1300 on parts, and then skimping on the PSU to save 50-100 bucks and have the entire rig fried.

I agree with what your friend says, but, you did ask for the best you could get in the $1300-$1500 range, and the two posts above did that. However, if you don't mind the cheaper cpu and no ssd, you could get a better mb that supports sli, and get a 2nd 970. That would boost your gaming performance while staying in the price range you specified.

I haven't looked at the builds, just replying to the information above.

Most of your friends points are around what he deems as necessary to current gen gaming. If you have the budget for something better, it's wise to look at future proofing where possible. More RAM can be added later, another HDD easy, but to skimp on a CPU now will mean a greater cost in the future to upgrade than going with that upgrade now.

That said, even the current gen games I play use multi-threading, and if you take a look at benchmarks of i5 vs i7 in games like BF4 you'll see a performance difference. Also next gen games are going to use multi-threading more too, so if I had the budget I'd get the i7.

More airflow isn't necessarily better, heatsink design and materials can make a huge difference, always compare benchmarks when comparing products.

I have an SSD and even in older games like GuildWars2 it makes a huge difference to load times when transitioning between areas. With BF4 it lets me load into a MP game and be killing ppl while my HDD friends are still looking at a loading screen.

And just to throw it out there, I actually dislike modular PSUs, my current one is modular because it was on sale below the price of others in its range, but I'd never consider paying more for a modular one. Each to their own (-:

Your friends seems to have a reasonable knowledge, I'd recommend you sit with him and look at benchmarks of games you actually play, and benchmarks of the major components you are looking at getting. Many of these will have benchmarks showing a range of comparison components. So many BF4 benchmarks will show graphs of BF4 performance on a range of CPUs including i3, i5, i7 and some AMD, this makes it easy to compare performance to price and meet your needs.

"Alright boss let's fight. First of all, an i5, especially a 4th generation, is going to be better for current generation and popular games. It has better single-threaded performance than an i7"

lol no