EVE General Discussion

Be careful with premade computers.

Typically, and alienware is professional at this, they try to sell you more CPU than you need, with a really expensive computer case, and a barely gaming quality graphics card, with everything else (motherboard, power supply unit, ect) being generic junk.

If you are looking at getting a decent computer for your money, focus on getting an unlocked CPU such as the i5 k series. You wont make use of the hyperthreading an i7 offers and the speed is exactly the same between the i5 and i7 but the cost is roughly $100 less for the same speed minus hyperthreading that games don't make use of.

Then make sure you get at least a GTX #60 series or 70 series card. The first number indicates the cards generation, so the older cards will be 660 the newest will be 960. Graphics card is where most of your money should be spent for a gaming computer.

AMD is a bit more tricky but you should look at their comparative chips and cards to the i5 and the GTX960 if you want to go that route.

Once you've priced out the card and cpu...which should run you around $300 for the card and $300 for the chip (estimate I haven't built my own in a few years) The rest can go into pricing out the components, get a decent Power supply unit to ensure years of long gaming sessions (cooler master or corsair are my favorite) which should cost about $150 for a quality product.

Motherboard, get one without all the bells and whistles but of a decent brand (ASUS basically though GIGABYTE is decent)
Don't bother with one that can fix 6 graphic cards ect, or one with TONS on features that you don't need.

Everything else you can pretty much bargain hunt on and be fine. Generic Motherboards are actually quite fine, but changing out a bad MOBO down the road is a total pain so its worth the extra $50 to get a name brand one.

People laugh at Alienware because they sell over priced computers to computer illiterate folk who have no idea what the actual cost of the computing power they are paying for is. Do some research. I suggest using newegg.com (even if its USA only) to read component review ect.

Get an i5 - not an i7 (the K versions tend to be the ones for OC), unless you want to do more than gaming (ie: heavy photoshopping, video rendering etc in which case an i7 might be the better choice) - I don't know much about AMD tbh - some others will, no doubt.
Exchange the stockcooler with something like the Hyper Evo 212 (just an example). Buying assembled pc's, usually come with stockcoolers => bad idea for OC'ing

Get (at least) 128GB SSD - put your OS on it (and load-heavy 'main'games) - add extra (1TB) HDD for storage and your alternative games (green labeled ones are cheapest if you don't mind the speed, hence the SSD anyways).

Get a minimum of 8GB RAM - preferably 1600 or 1800's - you can always upgrade over time, don't worry too much, just get a reliable brand.

Get a decent PSU (!) have it at least 80% bronze labeled - preferably a modulated one (though these tend to be more expensive). PSU's tend to be cheap in prefab pc's.. bad idea. If it dies, it can take every other part in your pc with it.

Get a nice graphics card - but don't go overkill on the GPU in comparance with your CPU.

Get a nice looking case to your own liking - make sure it's big enough for airflow. Preferably PSU placed at the bottom, cable management tucked away (= airflow). Having a button on your case to adjust your fanspeed, lights and/or reset button comes in handy too. You can go as cheap or as crazy as you want to with this..



Personally I'd reckon:
- if you looking for a very (very very) cheap pc to just do basic office work and some internetting => buy your pc
- if you're into gaming or anything more than the above => assemble / let it assemble for you.



You can adjust anything for the price you're willing to pay.

LOL .. wow. And how many of you are actually career IT people ?

I see a lot of buzz words flying around with no pre qualifying questions. Not saying that there are not some valid points, just sayin.

my vote out of these posts so far goes to Steve Ronuken's link.

Also Ptraci's advice of "anything sold with the word "gaming" in it is going to be overpriced" to very accurate. Its called human marketing. Make cr*p sound good enough and someone will buy it. Enough people buy and you open a company called Packard Bell.

Alianware - you're paying for a name and a lingering reputation. They suffered the same success failure as Pioneer did in the 80's. They went mass market and quality took a dump. Did you know that they're owned by Dell? Our data center is all Dell and the business class dell platforms are good. But the "Bestbuy" class of dell .. wouldn't touch em.

Alienware - was great now its dog turd in a plastic box. The guy above is correct they are owned by Dell now. Your best bet is indeed the Bespoke sites.

It depends what country your in but there are sites that let you swap in and out all the components of the PC - then they build it for you. I have done this many times and currently have a rig that is ridiculously fast and powerful.

Windows 8 is not meant for desktops and I don't care how many updates they patch onto it to make it more user friendly I am a windows 7 man, Windows 8 made me feel ill.

PCspecialist.co.uk is ok but expensive. palicomp.co.uk are great and have good customer support ( I bricked a GPU flashing the bios and they sent me an upgrade free of charge - and that was 3 months out of warranty). www.scan.co.uk are good too. There are a myriad of options and it is fun comparing them - well I think it is :)

Also you could buy the components and DIY - thats fun and not as hard as people would have you believe.

They ship every order with a pack of haribo. Its amazing.

I don't know if they ship overseas, but Digital Storm's Vanquish is considered as good a buy for value as you're going to get on a gaming PC without building one yourself. The highest two price points for that model, in particular, are really strong for boutique PCs.

I own a DS, by the way -- a higher-end rig I just bought about a month ago for around 2k. I don't home build, and you couldn't pay me to put together a liquid cooled rig, so I don't mind overpaying, especially with that year-long parts warranty. So far it's been rock solid, and their interactions throughout the build process were both polite and timely. Would buy again.

I didn't buy one of those largely because you have to get them with windows 8 (and I wanted a few other odds and ends). The PC I ended up purchasing at around 2K wasn't a smashing deal (no boutique buy ever will be), but I don't think I did badly:

Processor: Intel Core i7 4790K 4.0 GHz (Codename Devils Canyon) (Unlocked CPU) (Quad Core)
Motherboard: ASUS Z97M-PLUS (Intel Z97 Chipset) (MATX)
System Memory: 16GB DDR3 1600MHz Digital Storm Certified Performance Series (Highly Recommended) (Hand Tested)
Power Supply: 600W Corsair CX600
Storage Set 1: 1x SSD (250GB Samsung 840 EVO)
Storage Set 2: 1x Storage (1TB Western Digital - Black Edition)
Graphics Card(s): 1x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4GB (Includes PhysX)
Sound Card: Integrated Motherboard Audio
Extreme Cooling: H20: Stage 2: Digital Storm Vortex 240mm Radiator Liquid CPU Cooler (Extreme-Performance Edition)
Windows OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-Bit Edition)

seriously.

It's a small 'fun sized' bag (larger bags would be no fun, no?) but they stick one in, with any order. I got one with my X55.