I recommend Solus. It has all the relevant Nvidia drivers branches.

The default drivers for your card are atm at version 415.25.

Just go with Ubuntu, seriously. It's the easiest distribution around.

thanks so far - I am considering Fedora over Ubuntu - would be happy to hear any reasons why I should not do Fedora

Well, why are you considering it over Ubuntu? Ubuntu is one of the most beginner friendly distributions around and the main one supported by game developers.

Go with Ubuntu or similar. Fedora is not supported officially by most games and steam itself, driver installation can be troublesome for new users etc.

was considering Fedora since less overhead - more streamlined

but thanks - now it looks like I'll go with the vote here

Fedora user here -- I also think that you should go with Ubuntu; but only because that would make for a smoother start. After you get some experience, come to understand what you really want from a distro, etc., you'll want to try out other distros anyway.

Fedora doesn't really have any major drawbacks for gaming (not being able to build 32 bit wine [quirks having to do with multilib support in Fedora] is about the only gaming-related frustration I can recall having in a very long time). It's also real easy to add multimedia & proprietary driver repos. It's a pretty fast moving distro, and occasionally (rarely) a kernel update might break the proprietary nvidia drivers -- which is not a big deal, as it's easily fixed. But still, with Ubuntu you don't have to think about any of this right as you're starting out.

If you want something with less overhead, by the way, you might want to try Xubuntu first. It's standard Ubuntu that comes default with a somewhat simpler (in my opinion, FAR more useable) desktop environment. Check out www.xubuntu.org and decide for yourself.

As other said ubuntu could be more friendly, however fedora is usefull for work

Maybe can begin with lubuntu / xubuntu / ubuntu mate

Gnome and kde needs some tweaks

^_^

GNOME comes ootb with the most essential extensions on most distros (eg Solus, Ubuntu, Antergos).

Also, with this kind of hardware, he shouldn't really worry about any overhead. The games performance won't be affected be the DE of choice.

In my experience, Ubuntu is not the easiest. Why? Because the upgrades between releases don't always work correctly. I've always had headaches when upgrading between releases.

You could try Mint with Cinnamon for an easy transition from Windows, almost no configuration needed it just works and you have access to the latest Ubuntu drivers from PPA but sadly not the latest Kernel, but with your config it should be more than fine.

Manjaro could be a nice introduction too in my opinion.