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For those of you that DO NOT like to build your own PC.
There is a nice Black Friday gaming PC over on Newegg that I wanted to point out. Considerable markdown.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883220405
Intel Core i7 4770(3.40GHz)
8GB DDR3 1TB HDD Capacity
Windows 8
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 (3gb)
$899 after rebate (I have seen it as high as $1299 in the past)
Comments
Even on or near Black Friday, the standard rules still apply: if they won't tell you what's in it, it's probably junk.
For example, the pictures make it clear that it only has one memory module. Paying a premium for a Core i7 processor while disabling overclocking is also doing it wrong, at least if gaming is your intended use. Building a high-powered gaming rig with only one case fan is also a bad idea. For just shy of $1000, you can do better than that--a lot better. Even without building your own.
And no, just because someone offered to sell it for $1300 once doesn't make it a good deal. Nor would it be a good deal if someone once offered to sell it for $2000, or $5000, or $10 million. The percentage markdown is meaningless; what matters is what you get and how much you pay. Actually, that's good advice to keep in mind more generally, as overpricing goods while claiming that they're nominally worth even more inflated prices is a very, very common tactic.
Your average gamer, which is who I aimed this at. Is never going to OC their system.
If a user bought the CPU and GPU alone they would pay over 600 - regardless of sales. Thats how much that stuff cost.
Take a step back here and look at this from my intended perspective. Someone who can not build their own and is on a budget.
A cursory check of AVA Direct and iBuyPower finds that you can get roughly equivalent hardware for about the same price. But those also give you the chance to correct the glaring defects in the Asus system you linked. So no, it's not an exceptional deal or even a decent one for someone who can't or won't build their own computer.
Even if you could pay that much for the CPU and GPU, that's something you don't do if you're on a tight budget. A quick check of New Egg finds a Core i5-4670K (same Haswell cores, same base clock speed, plus overclockable) for $225, and a GTX 760 for $240 before a $10 rebate.
Yeah I will just chalk it up to selective reading at this point. Each time I mention the intention of this he blabs about overclocking. He also hasn't posted any similar deals for those with the inability or that lack the desire to build a system.
Obviously he is an enthusiast and that is great so am I, but the majority buy a product in a box that suits their needs. They don't tweak, they don't OC, they don't change around components and they want a single warranty for the system.
I have also known people to buy a prebuilt system and then immediately change around parts. Say take a 2tb HDD, a superior power supply from their old system, maybe more memory and change those out on arrival. Once more, no one needs to OC these CPUs, its not necessary for any game we throw at them.
If you're buying new parts only to toss them in favor of something else when the computer arrives, you're almost guaranteed to overpay severely, as you're still paying good money for the parts that you end up not using. A computer that was a marginal value at $975 becomes a terrible value at $1300 when you have to replace several parts to upgrade to what you could have gotten elsewhere for $1100 if you had just bought the parts you wanted and skipped the junk in the first place.
Besides, if you can replace parts like that, you can also build your own.
Actually in that case I was thinking more along the lines of using existing parts. From a previous built. Not new parts.
I don't know anymore. Most people I know would rather buy a budget machine every three or four years and then toss the old PC. I've almost fallen into the same trap over the last eight years in that it did become simpler. Especially for some one that likes small form factor gaming rigs like me. It's the Black Friday shopping holiday in a few hours for most of us. Most of the major computer vendors will have some steep discounts on select game capable rigs. I would be tempted to go configure a Revolt at Ibuypower or check on an Alienware X51 at Dell as they are around the same price today and more competent machines with better service agreements.
But you know, the thing I really miss about building a PC is the FREEDOM! If something goes wrong, I can fix it. There is no question about quality of workmanship, no junk software loaded (outside internet explorer, thanks MS), the parts are retail rather than shaved down OEM, I get exactly what I want and can save several hundred bucks for a killer rig... It just gets to be a hassle though sometimes with time and life when you'd rather just pick something up and go now.
Upon further review, the video card in the system of the original post isn't what you think it is. The GeForce GTX 760 has a 256-bit memory bus, meaning that the correct amount of video memory to give the card is either 2 GB or 4 GB. 3 GB makes it a near lock that it's the OEM-only version of the GTX 760:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-760-oem/specifications
That's basically the same card except clocked lower with a 192-bit memory bus instead of 256-bit. The nearest Nvidia equivalent in cards sold to the general public is the much cheaper GeForce GTX 660, not GTX 760. The GTX 660 actually has more memory bandwidth, as the memory is clocked higher. The GTX 760 has 6 SMXes as compared to the 5 in the GTX 660, but the GTX 660 clocks them higher. Which of the two cards is faster will vary from one game to the next.
If they hadn't explicitly said that it had 3 GB of GDDR5 memory, I wouldn't have caught that. For that matter, it would have been undetectable in their claimed specs. How many other things do you think the computer has that are like that that you wouldn't catch from the claimed specs? I already noted above that it only comes with one memory module; you're probably out $60 or $70 or so to add a second, unless you want to cripple the machine by losing half of your memory bandwidth.
Maybe people like the OP could benefit from doing a bit of research on each component, which isn't too great a pain in the rear, and then ordering from someplace like Dell? Who kind of lets you build it custom online, so to speak. The next plateau, building it yourself, does take at a minimum two or three weeks of 2 hour a day reading. At least in my opinion if you want to do it right.
But let's admit it Quizzical. Stable and safe overclocking requires a lot of time and energy being expended. If only for doing the proper stability testing. And probably some basic aptitude is required as well. Having gone through all this again just recently building my new system, I had to cringe several times reading posts by people in various places who you could just tell had absolutely no clue whatsoever. And were going to end up with an unstable wreck of a computer. (Probably later complaining on some other forum about buggy software.)
Anyway Jyliga, these are two places that you can read about individual components. Both in the articles and also on the forums. And if you can get a basic idea of what you want and need, and what you don't want or need, then maybe you can make a custom order somewhere? There's probably some places even better than Dell. I'm just not up on that particular aspect.
http://www.anandtech.com/
http://www.tomshardware.com/
And here's a stickied poster on the Anand forums who chooses a new set of 'midrange' components every two weeks or so depending on current prices and component quality. So you could just say to a custom builder "build me this".
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2192841
I'm not arguing that everyone should overclock. I am, however, saying that a Core i7 desktop processor is putting money in the wrong place for gaming purposes. If the extra 100 MHz doesn't matter, you can just get a Core i5-4670 and call it good enough. If the extra 100 MHz does matter, you can get a Core i5-4670K and overclock it by 100 MHz.
My argument against the computer in the original post is not that you can get those exact components elsewhere for cheaper. Rather, it's that you can get something else that, for gaming purposes, is better for the same price.
Right. I went for the i5 4670k recently myself. And even if I didn't have the inclination to do a custom overclock, I could have easily hit one single button in the BIOS/UEFI and had it running faster than a stock i7 4770 in a safe, lower level 'predefined' overclock. Which my $99 Asrock Z87 Pro3 motherboard includes (although the faster predefined overclocks were grossly over-volted IMO. And I hope any sucker who uses one of these has a good cooler and keeps an eye on his temperatures).
So no Hyper-threading with the i5 4670k? Bah, I think 4 cores are going to be plenty for anything I'm going to be doing. And I know I'm never going to be running 'virtual machines'. So I won't miss this feature for sure.