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Can someone advise me on a computer I should buy?
I'm looking for a gaming desktop, I know I won't be able to get anything high end or whatever, but I'm looking for a medium computer than can play most games and has room for upgrades......If i ever learn how to do that. :P And my price range would be around 500-700 dollars. I've been looking at a few on Newegg and amazon, mostly from cyberpower, but they all have mixed reviews. So if anyone could help me that would be great! Thanks. ^_^
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Or ask someone who's good with computers to help you build one.
I don't know what its like in the usa, but here in the UK, pcs from high street retail chains are massively overpriced
Making one yourself can be fun, if you dont want to do that I suggest Newegg's http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229333.
You can upgrade the GPU down the road and the PSU if desired.
You can build a decent desktop within your price range. Or buy the parts and pay someone at a local PC shop to spend an hour putting it together. I assume you would be able to load the OS and what not once the physical parts were put together?
If you take your time and shop for specials on Newegg.com, Tigerdirect.com, Amazon, ect over a few weeks you can get many PC components on a 24-48 sale. Example I bought another samsung 830 SSD ( 120G) for $89 and free shipping at Newegg a few weeks ago, they had a 24 hour special going.
If your on a limited budget and want the most for your money then take a month, shop and buy stuff on sale, once you get everything build it ( or have it built) and prosper.
If you must have it now and buy from Cyberpower, Ibuypower, ect a budget desktop. Then you will get exactly that, a budget desktop.
I can put together a real decent gaming PC for $800 or less on newegg right now, including OS. That will blow cyberpower out of the water when it comes to reliable, good components.
Either way I hope it works out for you
If you decide to build / buy parts. Post your stated budget and folks will help you pick parts within that budget.
Good luck
I recomend the HAL 9000, they have never be known to make a mistake, and enjoy playing games with humans.
On your budget, you want an AMD Trinity based rig. That launches next Tuesday, so I'd recommend waiting for it.
In the meantime, can you assemble parts yourself or would you need to pay someone else to do so for you? If the latter, then assume that that will eat up around $100 of your budget. All you need is a screwdriver, and if you haven't done it before, then it's easier than you probably think. It's not really any harder to plug things into SATA ports and memory slots inside the case than ethernet ports and USB ports outside of the case--and you'll need to do the latter even if you buy a prebuilt computer, unless you also hire someone to come to your house and plug it in.
I really can't build one myself.
I know close to nothing about computers. I know buying one from a company is a sin to you guys, but I think it would be better for the first time. :P I was thinking about this one, which was advised:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229333
And also these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883227408
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229285
http://www.amazon.com/CyberpowerPC-Gamer-Xtreme-GXi290-Desktop/dp/B008ABKW2C/ref=sr_1_5?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1348938757&sr=1-5&keywords=cyberpower
http://www.amazon.com/iBuyPower-Gamer-Power-AM522D3-Desktop/dp/B006O5ZJJ2/ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1348938757&sr=1-2&keywords=cyberpower
I know they're all similar, but I wanted to know if anything bad or good about them stood out to you guys. Thanks again.
commodore 64
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
or the
Timex 2068
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068
or a Tandy 1000!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SX.2FTX
WOPR FTW!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOPR
and steven hawings saying "would you like to play a game" lmao
Either sterotypical or trololololol
Looking at: The Repopulation
Preordering: None
Playing: Random Games
Do not buy a pre-built computer at all. Ever. Unless you live in a very small market with very few options (say, a country that most people in the world haven't heard of, and no option to buy things from a foreing supplier), in which case you can probably still get around it.
If you can't build your own, then the next best thing is getting one built to order from a site that lets you pick the parts. That will let you get a computer configured properly. Buying a prebuilt computer from a site like New Egg or Amazon rarely will.
But again, anything you could buy today on your budget would be obsolete next Tuesday. So you really should wait three days.
The one thing that the computers you link all have in common is a cheap junk power supply. So if you want the computer to have any semblance of reliability, you're looking at having to replace the power supply yourself as soon as it arrives. If you can do that, then you really should just build your own. They probably also all have ultra low-end motherboards, but three of them don't say what they have.
Your first, third, and fifth links all have a Radeon HD 6670, which is basically the slowest you can go and call it a budget gaming card. The fourth has a GeForce GT 620, which is substantially worse.
The second link is a different class of product entirely. Its Radeon HD 6870 is somewhat dated, but still a respectable gaming card. It also has an eight core processor. But eight slower cores rather than four faster cores only works well in things that can scale to many cores. And with a truly ancient chipset, I wouldn't be surprised if processor and/or don't perform properly.
The fourth computer also has a low-voltage processor, where the basic idea is that you pay Intel extra to bin out the parts that can run at reduced voltages and clock speeds. That means you pay extra for less performance, but get less power consumption in return. And then they pair that with the least energy-efficient video card they can find, which completely defeats the point of paying extra for energy efficiency on the processor.
Fixed that for you. Speaking of which, does Dell have any fanboys?
If you are dead set against building it and all of the pre built computers in your price range suck, consider going on craigslist.
Where I live in Florida, people are always unloading their old gaming rigs for VERY cheap. Sometimes, though not always, you can get a PC less than a year old with a fast GPU in it already. You have to know your parts though.
But seriously, you should buy the parts and have someone build it. I watched my father build my first custom PC and I've built mine ever since. You must have a freind or family member that could do it for you. If you buy a pre built PC in your price range, expect to have to upgrade the PSU & GPU at minimum.
There will most certainly not be a pre built PC with Trinity parts on Tuesday but not too long after there might be on Ibuypower or Cyber Power, etc.
I would not buy any of the PCs you linked. I would save my money and wait until I had enough to buy a PC worth gaming on. While were at it, list the specs of the PC you are using now. You might be a couple upgrades from a respectable PC now?
You could do that, but you are better off spending more to get what you want up front rather than immediately throwing out parts and upgrading. Let me take another look at your links.
This is the best of the ones you linked. The rest have really crappy graphics cards. If you are really in the position of not knowing any builders, than I take back what I said - get this one that you linked with the 6850. For $660, free 3 day shipping and no tax outisde of CA, it's actually quite a good deal. I play with 2 6850s and it chews through most games on high settings:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883227408&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&AID=10446076&PID=4176333&SID=j4s5e7u2x5u4
You will easily be able to play all the games you mentioned with this one. The motherboard has one PCI-E lane so you will not be able to crossfire. Not a big deal for the price though.
if you plan to be a gamer on a desktop, its best for you to learn how to build/maintain a pc rig as it will save you time/money and problems in the long run and actually make your day to day usage enjoyable.
while it seems daunting at first. once you learn the basics its super easy to build a system from scratch. as well as you learn how to maintain it correctly so it lasts for years to come until you need to upgrade parts to play the next huge game.
while i understand most inexperianced buyers take factory built systems.. they are ultimately taking it in the backside from the store on them. be it price or just simply the parts.
buying a factory built rig is the same as buying a cellphone from 1980s or a laptop from 1995... while it looks all shiny and sounds killer its ultimately a waste of money and time. best advice people can give you is shop around find deals on quality parts. and built the system your self (trust me systems in 2010+ are easier to build then systems from 1990... with their poster instructions and self help guides they have now lol)
if there is a local comp shop ( a mom &pop style) you could ask around there as well. DO NOT rely on help from computer staff at big named chains coughfutureshop/bestbuy/walmart...cough as they will try and sell you a kitchen sink while claming its the next big GPU...
if you plan to tinker with upgrading parts later on, you can do a few things to help you along.
if you ultimately plan to buy a factory built system. go for one that has a majorty of the parts you want (HDD/mobo/ram/drives *cd/dvd/blu ect*) then look at replacing the less quality parts.
with factory systems you will want to replace the powersuply (PSU) as those WILL always fail... they are simply garbage. also the video card may very well be out of date for your needs/power. so you should see about upgrading videocard (GPU)
keep and eye on the cpu and motherboard though. as those will be the biggest problem for upgrading later on should you find you got a lower quality one.
Honestly, it's incredibly simple.
I built my first PC when I was 12 years old. My dad bought me all the parts, gave me Bigelow's Build Your Own PC Pocket Reference (this book is very old now, so don't use it), and said "Have fun!"
Within a week, my first PC was up and running (cut me some slack, I was young and building guides weren't readily available on the Internet 17 years ago). The biggest challenge was learning how to partition the drives manually from command prompt and get Windows 95 installed, this isn't a problem you would need to worry about today though.
TLDR, if a 12 year old can do it without help from the Internet, then you can do it.
Another note: Many beggining computer users are intimidated by computers. Once you get passed that fear, then a whole new world will open up to you. Don't worry, you probably won't break anything. If you do break something, then it can be fixed or replaced.
I always had an affinity for electronics when I was a kid, so I never experienced that fear. I just jumped right in and hoped for the best (even got electrocuted once when I tried rigging a wrist watch to plug in to a 120v outlet, that was at age 6 lol).
You can do it man!
You can actually buy a Trinity system right now:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103462
The problem is that it's still prebuilt only, which means that you'd have to live with a very stupid hardware configuration.
AMD FX-series processors that you see available now are last year's Zambezi chip, with cores of the Bulldozer architecture. The architecture was revolutionary in a number of ways. Unfortunately, it was also more or less broken. It used a lot more power than it should have, in exchange for giving a lot less performance than it should have.
The other major desktop product that AMD launched last year was Llano, which is the A-series processors that you might find. This was AMD's first attempt at making integrated graphics that can compete favorably with lower end discrete video cards. The die has both graphics and a processor in it. The processor side was largely derived from 2009's Phenom II processors. Llano had a heavy emphasis on bringing power consumption down rather than bringing performance up, and performance suffers as a result.
Llano was a revolutionary product for laptops. You can now get a $400 laptop that can run pretty much any game smoothly on integrated graphics. There are a lot of sacrifices to get there, but that's hundreds less than it would have taken a year and a half ago.
But in order to go into a laptop, you have to have low power consumption. So AMD took the dies that needed higher voltages (and hence more power) than was a good idea in a laptop, clocked and volted them higher, and sold them as desktop chips. That was nifty for gaming on a severe budget (say, under $500), but barely beating out a $600 laptop isn't what you want in a desktop on a larger budget.
Trinity largely remedies the defects of both architectures. Its Piledriver cores are basically a fixed version of last year's Bulldozer cores. Performance is way up, and power consumption is way down. On the processor side, it's much faster than Llano, too. Its integrated graphics are also significantly better than Llano.
And AMD has taken further steps toward integrating the GPU and CPU. For example, to upload a data from the processor to the video card, you'd traditionally have had to copy the data over the PCI Express bus, which takes a while. With Trinity (and I think Llano), all that the CPU has to do is to notify the GPU that some particular data in system memory is needed in video memory, and then without having to copy it anywhere, the GPU uses it as video memory. That saves both time and bandwidth.
Trinity is primarily focused on laptops, where having a CPU and GPU in a single chip to save power is a huge deal. The power savings don't matter so much in a desktop, but on a per-core basis, Trinity should be the fastest processor AMD has ever made.
The processor-only version without integrated graphics is called Vishera and is rumored to launch sometime in October. That's a more direct successor to last year's Zambezi, as it basically takes the broken die and fixes it, again, for higher performance at lower power consumption. The processor cores in Vishera will be basically the same as in Trinity.
Trinity actually launched in May. The problem is that AMD didn't have enough dies yet to fill both the desktop and laptop markets. Since it's a killer product in laptops and merely a nice budget offering in desktops, AMD decided to prioritize laptops first. As with Llano, some dies needed too much power to put in a laptop, so AMD sold them as desktop chips. But without enough of them to meet desktop demand, they only sold them to select OEMs, rather than directly to the general public.
AMD presumably stopped building Llano chips a long time ago, and has been focused on Trinity (and Vishera) for some time now. But you don't want to have an official launch and say, the first products should show up at retail in a month or two. Rather, they stockpile inventory for a while ahead of time, so that on launch day, anyone who wants to buy one can. That official release for desktops comes Tuesday, October 2.
You asked if Trinity will fit your budget, and the answer is, yes, it will. That's why I brought it up. AMD has said that "A10 Virgo will be priced in the range of the i3 2120 or i3 3220". The latter processors are currently $125 and $130, respectively, on New Egg. For comparison, your links include a Core i5-3450 ($195), an FX-8120 ($160), a Core i5-3470T (non-T version is $200), and two with an FX-4100 ($110).
There are two different directions that you could go with Trinity. One is to save some money and say, if you're not going to get a video card faster than integrated graphics anyway, then you might as well just get integrated graphics. You get the A10-5800K, and then use the Radeon HD 7660D integrated graphics in it. You'd have to pay an extra $10 or so for 1866 MHz memory (as opposed to 1600 MHz; when you're using integrated graphics, the extra memory bandwidth is critical), but that would let you entirely skip paying $70 for a video card. This would basically be filling the Llano segment for severe budget gaming desktops, but Trinity has markedly higher performance than Llano.
The other direction would be to say, let's also get a discrete video card, and only use the processor side of Trinity. But since we're not going to use the integrated graphics, let's save some money by getting a chip that doesn't have as good of integrated graphics. While an A10-5800K has the entire GPU fully functional, the A8-5600K disables 1/3 of it. AMD and Nvidia commonly do this with defective GPUs: rather than tossing an expensive die in the garbage, you disable parts that were broken and sell the rest at a discount.
There's also an Athlon X4 750K that disables the GPU entirely. You basically can't sell those in a laptop, as the main point of Trinity in a laptop is the integrated graphics. But that's fine in a desktop if you weren't going to use the integrated graphics, anyway. I don't know how much cheaper it will be than an A10-5800K, but I'd guess a price tag around $100. (For comparison, with current generation parts, an A8-3870K is $110 and an Athlon II X4 641 is $75.) Since the Athlon X4 750K is mainly chosen for the broken GPU, it's highly probable it would be trivial to overclock the CPU to the same speed as an A10-5800K. And it's likely that if you overclocked both the A10-5800K and the Athlon X4 750K, you'd tend to get about the same maximum overclock from both.
That would let you get much better performance than an FX-4100, and generally better gaming performance than an FX-8120 (four faster cores beat eight slower cores if you can't put more than four cores to good use), at a lower price tag. It won't catch a Core i5-3450 or Core i5-3470T in gaming performance, but it won't trail that far behind, and it will be dramatically cheaper.
Trinity processors will be available to purchase from sites like New Egg and Amazon on Tuesday. While some OEMs like Apple really take their time at rolling out new hardware, some sites that let you customize components are much quicker to do so, and I'd expect a number of such sites to offer to build a Trinity desktop for you on Tuesday. Some companies have presumably known the launch date of Trinity for a long time, and it's just a matter of screwing together off-the-shelf parts, so desktops don't need to have the sort of delay that laptops and tablets do, because the latter needs so much custom engineering.