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New computer.

Muhammed

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I've been thinking about getting a new computer.

Any tips or heads up suggestions would be very much appreciated.
 
laptop or desktop?
For what purpose?
What price range?
 
I'm thinking a desktop. Just for gaming and surfing the net. And some work. Like getting pics and vids from construction jobsites.
 
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Best to stay away from Mac. Although I don't do a lot of gaming, whenever I get the urge to try out a new game I smack into the harsh reality that almost none of the best ones are for mac. I still have to try that bootcamp idea that yourstar suggested, though.
 
I'm thinking a desktop. Just for gaming and surfing the net. And some work. Like getting pics and vids from construction jobsites.

Okay so gaming.

Processor:

Best price vs what you get is the i5 processor. The i5-4670k is considered the biggest bang for the buck and you can overclock the hell out of it. Now if you are not going to overclock, then the i5-4570 processor.

Motherboard:

This is a tricky one, depending if you are going to overclock or not. Personally I would go for a 1150 socket (Haswell motherboard) H87 (more USB 3.0) for non overclocking or a Z87 chipset motherboard for overclocking. You can spend a lot on a motherboard, but in reality the cheapest ones are often just as good as the expensive ones for most people. Just make sure that you have 4 sockets for ram and a few PCI slots.. some real cheap ones only have 2 sockets and no PCI slots.. bad idea. You have Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte and MSI as the big guns in this area.. all are proven good brands. I would not spend more than 100 bucks on a motherboard.

Ram:

Go for 1600+ mhz ram.. Kingston has there Hyper X and it is good. 4 GB is fine, 8 is better.

SSD/Harddrives:

Any SSD that can do at least 500 mb/s read and write is just fine. Samsung and Cruical make some good ones and are relatively cheap. 120 GB version is a minimum and only use it for the OS and programs. If you want to use it for games as well, then it might need to be bigger depending on the size of the games. Buy a 1TB+ ordinary drive for general storage and even games. Few games actually benefit that much from an SSD.

Graphics card:

This is where you can buy yourself into the poor house... by far the most expensive part of the computer ironically.

Best Graphics Cards For The Money: June 2014

has a good rundown depending on how much you want to spend.
 
That's a great summary by PeteEU. Let me add that many gamers will want the capability to go multiple monitor and you should research the graphics cards that support that option.
 
Go to Walmart, they sell desktops cheap because they're being phased out, sometime in the near future, desktops will be obsolete.
 
Go to Walmart, they sell desktops cheap because they're being phased out, sometime in the near future, desktops will be obsolete.

No, to all of it. You're better off buying a refurbed machine from a trusted vendor than buy from WalMart or any such Mart. And desktops will change their form, they'll get smaller, but the home computer will never be obsolete.
 
Go to Walmart, they sell desktops cheap because they're being phased out, sometime in the near future, desktops will be obsolete.

First off desktops wont be obsolete.. ever.

Secondly places like Walmart sell them cheap because they are mostly last years model, with cheap components.
 
This company makes the best custom PCs for gaming.

Alienware - Custom Gaming Computers - PC Gaming At Its Best

Alienware is over-rated.

They're good but there are certainly better, more customizable laptops out there. In fact, customization isn't even needed for some laptops anyway because they have a huge range.

It depends on the gaming too.

I play starcraft which is a huge game that takes a lot of power to run. If you're going to go play smaller games then of course the computer won't have to be as strong.
 
Okay so gaming.

Processor:

Best price vs what you get is the i5 processor. The i5-4670k is considered the biggest bang for the buck and you can overclock the hell out of it. Now if you are not going to overclock, then the i5-4570 processor.

Motherboard:

This is a tricky one, depending if you are going to overclock or not. Personally I would go for a 1150 socket (Haswell motherboard) H87 (more USB 3.0) for non overclocking or a Z87 chipset motherboard for overclocking. You can spend a lot on a motherboard, but in reality the cheapest ones are often just as good as the expensive ones for most people. Just make sure that you have 4 sockets for ram and a few PCI slots.. some real cheap ones only have 2 sockets and no PCI slots.. bad idea. You have Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte and MSI as the big guns in this area.. all are proven good brands. I would not spend more than 100 bucks on a motherboard.

Ram:

Go for 1600+ mhz ram.. Kingston has there Hyper X and it is good. 4 GB is fine, 8 is better.

SSD/Harddrives:

Any SSD that can do at least 500 mb/s read and write is just fine. Samsung and Cruical make some good ones and are relatively cheap. 120 GB version is a minimum and only use it for the OS and programs. If you want to use it for games as well, then it might need to be bigger depending on the size of the games. Buy a 1TB+ ordinary drive for general storage and even games. Few games actually benefit that much from an SSD.

Graphics card:

This is where you can buy yourself into the poor house... by far the most expensive part of the computer ironically.

Best Graphics Cards For The Money: June 2014

has a good rundown depending on how much you want to spend.

For RAM I got 8 instead of 4, but then again we need to know what kind of gaming this guy does, smaller games or huge games that take lots of power.
 
First off desktops wont be obsolete.. ever.

Secondly places like Walmart sell them cheap because they are mostly last years model, with cheap components.

Couldn't the same be said of other companies who sell desktops? Such as bestbuy, tiger direct, and so forth? The desktop you buy today is either last year models or even worse, refurbished?
 
Couldn't the same be said of other companies who sell desktops? Such as bestbuy, tiger direct, and so forth? The desktop you buy today is either last year models or even worse, refurbished?

Yes if they are cheap. Only places you get this years model is at places like Dell or by buying the bits yourself or by requesting them built at a store that does it.
 
For RAM I got 8 instead of 4, but then again we need to know what kind of gaming this guy does, smaller games or huge games that take lots of power.

To be honest, 4 GB ram is fine for most (especially if you have an SSD for the OS and programs), and here the graphics card and amount of ram on it is more important. The higher ram is only really important for picture/video editing and big database runs and such things.
 
Yes if they are cheap. Only places you get this years model is at places like Dell or by buying the bits yourself or by requesting them built at a store that does it.

I had a buddy that purchased a top of the line Dell which turned out to be an absolute piece of junk. I've also heard other complaints about Dell too, much like lack of customer support type complaints.
 
I've been thinking about getting a new computer.

Any tips or heads up suggestions would be very much appreciated.

it depends on what you are looking for gaming PC's can go for 1000 up to 10's of thousands depending on what you do with them.

Processor

the I5 is probably intels best processor for the price. if you want to go with something just as good but a bit cheaper look at the athlon fx processors.
spending more than 150 for a processor is going to be to much.

Motherboard.

as long as it supports the processor MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS are the major players. asrock is just the budget line of ASUS motherboards.

Memory

4 is minimum 8 is great and memory is cheap.

harddrive.

SSD drives are still expensive and while getting you good load times it isn't worth the price at this point.
getting a high speed main drive and a large standard drive would be a better combo and cost less.

video cards

these are the gold of computers. check the link and do your research. you can find a model or two behind the best that perform just as well.


monitor.
is the other key. if you are wanting to do gaming you will need a monitor with a 2ms refresh and no more than 5 ms. 2 ms is way better though.

alienware avoid. they are nothing more than a dell computer with a premium charge.
dell avoid. their computers have nothing but trouble.
walmart avoid. they use the cheapest parts possible and these computers are impossible to upgrade.
 
I've been thinking about getting a new computer.

Any tips or heads up suggestions would be very much appreciated.

If you have a local small computer shop in your area, I'd recommend paying them a visit and have a chat with them.

My local shop has pre-designed custom built computers for reasonable prices and can easily upgrade various parts as you wish. If you think you might be able to build your own, you can save the cost of paying others to build it for you. (assembling computers really isn't that hard)

Another option I would recommend is a place like ibuypower. They have pre-designed systems and offer to you the ability to switch parts out to keep the machine within your price range.

You haven't said what kind of gaming you want to do. It makes a difference. If all you want is the "angry birds" or "solitare" kind of thing, you might not even need a graphics card. Any gaming above that will require a decision. You can get by with a mid-range card. I'd suggest something in the Nvidia 600 series or better. Don't know anything about AMD cards.

Other than that, PeteEU gave great advice.
 
I had a buddy that purchased a top of the line Dell which turned out to be an absolute piece of junk. I've also heard other complaints about Dell too, much like lack of customer support type complaints.

Quite the opposite experience here. While I dont agree with some of their policies... they would rather fix a defective device than replace it... they do get it done as fast as possible even for normal customers like me.

As for quality of their gear.. well it is for the most part good, with the most modern stuff. Prices are okay.

But the best thing is to build it yourself or get someone to do that... you get absolutely the best result out that. That is why "other" in the PC rankings of sales is like 40+% still.

Another good brand is Lenovo.. dunno about their service, but their builds are top notch.
 
To be honest, 4 GB ram is fine for most (especially if you have an SSD for the OS and programs), and here the graphics card and amount of ram on it is more important. The higher ram is only really important for picture/video editing and big database runs and such things.

Graphics card does play a huge role. I do edit videos and such, Starcraft automatically saves every rematch and allows for playback and more.

I still think it would just be helpful for us if the guy simply told us a little more than "I do gaming and stuff".

At the end of the day I just hope the guy gets an optimal computer that is the right price instead of getting one too weak and one with way more power than needed.
 
Graphics card does play a huge role. I do edit videos and such, Starcraft automatically saves every rematch and allows for playback and more.

I still think it would just be helpful for us if the guy simply told us a little more than "I do gaming and stuff".

At the end of the day I just hope the guy gets an optimal computer that is the right price instead of getting one too weak and one with way more power than needed.

I agree.

There is one hell of a difference wanting to play Civilization vs say Crysis 2 or 3 or whatever they are up to now in full HD or 4k quality hehe.
 
Get one with no free trial software. Don't need to start with a corrupted registry.

Try to get Windows 7 profession 64 rather than windows 8.

Get one what will output to a 4k monitor. Samsung has them last I looked at $699 for the 4k.
 
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