New Desktop PC

Yo,

looking to get myself a pretty much top-of-the-line desktop PC for my new home in Dubai in 2-3 weeks.

Talked with a friend in Germany, and he cobbled this system together for me:



My budget is US$ 4,000 for the rig. Anything above that and my SO will cockblock me.

Let me know whether you have suggestions on what specifications should be upgraded, or if I should buy anything extra to go with the PC (external).

Already got a sweet-ass 23" LED display and my beloved Sennheiser headset, so those areas remain covered.

Cheers

 

No motherboard?

It looks good. The I7 is pretty awesome. I prefer Radeon to NVIDIA, but I think that's more of a personal experience type of decision than anything else.

My only suggestion would be to make sure you shop around. I only spent $900 on my rig. Not that mine is as good as this guy. I only have a single 1GB Radeon 6870, 1T RPM HD, 8GB RAM, and none of the Pre-installed software, but a lot of places wanted $1,500 - $2,000 for similar machines. I did go through a smaller company , which can be risky, but it worked out well and saved me a lot of money.

Also, if you play games a lot, especially MMO or RPG type games, I can highly reccomend the 16 button big brother to the DeathAdder, the Naga:



I absolutely love this thing. Takes a minute to get used to, but once you do it presents all kinds of options.

 

In my opinion AlienWare is overpriced. To paraphrase Punk.of.Ages's comment, I would go over the detailed specification for that rig before purchasing.
I learned few weeks ago that i3 < i5 < i7 isn't true for all Intel cpus. Therefore one can often get more bang for the buck by buying an i5 cpu over same spec/performance i7 cpu. If you have specified requirements then I think the best way is to start by limiting what chipsets meet those requirements and then select the cpu. If you are going to be using a video card, and you most likely are, then selecting a motherboard and cpu that don't have built-in video can be a good idea (use search engines to find some interesting theories on this .
BTW I haven't bought a brand desktop machine since 2000 and then I didn't even get a choice That was an Compaq and it was a great machine as long as I didn't want to add anything to it. It killed at least 3 hd I added to it but the original hd is still around.
In short the pros and cons for brand desktops generally are :
Pro: warranty, stable, no worries that selected features work together, easier to get support and most have some diagnostic applications for troubleshooting
Con: Add ons and replacements maybe limited to manufacturer (ie. psu, optical drives, cooling ), may have to compromise requirements due to limited choices.
The pros reflect somewhat in the price as brand computers are usually more expensive than assembled parts.

As long you are happy with your computer that's all there is.

 

i would call that system overkill for anything but extensive final cut pro editing of video. if that's just how you roll cool, but if you're just putting together a gaming machine and you're only using a single monitor instead of 2 or 4, you'd be fine with a single graphics card. if you really want to splurge look around for the newest nvidia card...

The Spectacular Live Debut of Nvidia's $999 Dual-GPU Video Card
--- merged: Jun 11, 2012 6:06 PM ---
P.S. this is a great site for pc builds made for gaming. i linked a $2k build which is pretty sweet but i think you can explore from there to go up or down in price...

System Builder Marathon, June 2012: $2000 Performance PC : Ivy Bridge And Kepler Come Together

 

i just newegged a 680 and it came up, not sold out...

Newegg.com - Galaxy 68NPH6DV5ZGV GeForce GTX 680 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

 

ahh, ok. i've had a galaxy gtx 460 for 1.5 years now and it hasn't chugged on much of anything so i thought it'd be ok.

 

PC Hardware Buyer's Guide May 2012 | bit-tech.net

 

My biggest concern with new desktop systems is the sound card more than the graphics cards. Of course the last time i purchased a desktop was 3 years ago when my Athlon XP 1800 system finally died after 8 years. This "new" one still going strong for me aside from an occasional message that tells me the video card is just starting to consider having problems or need replacement. But even then my first step was to ignore the onboard sound and install my trusty Hercules Game Theatre XP with the breakout box., that box is the most used part of my system.

 

First off... Don't buy a dell. Secondly please don't buy a dell. As a last point: FOR THE LOVE OF GAME DON'T BUY A DELL. Their power supplies are FAMOUS for taking out the whole rig (or trying to) when they go, and possibly anybody in electrical contact, and in general their hardware quality is massively overpriced and incredibly under-engineered.

Also there's such a thing as diminishing returns, for almost half that price you can have a computer good enough that you really wouldn't notice the difference. I'd say for 2.5k you could probably build something just as absurdly overpowered off newegg and shipped to you and it'd have much better parts quality.

 

I'm actually checking out Newegg. No clue how to build your own rig and couldn't find whether they ship to Dubai.

 

they don't but if you're up for spending $4,000 on something even using mail forwarding you might come out cheaper.

 

Let's see what will happen.

 

Not sure this has much pertinence here overall but my only problem with my Dell laptop has been the hard drive going through the slooow but obvious death throes lately.
My desktop system is an Alienware, which of course has been owned by Dell for a few years now. That is going strong still.
On that note if I had time back then to actually plan on buying a new system rather than lose both of my then 8 year old systems less a week apart with no cash available for a new one, then I would have looked at building it myself first or be taking more time to find somebody out there that offers completely customisable and handbuilt systems.

 

Dell also has a habit of using proprietary power supplies, which I found out the hard way once while trying to do a simple diagnostic. Not sure if they've stopped that or not since I've pretty much categorically refused to bother opening them since then.