New Desktop Help

[Greenday]

I love my gaming. I love my laptop. Problem right now is my laptop is over four years old and is out of date. Currently, I'm using:

Dell Studio 1558
4GB RAM
Intel Core i5 CPU 2.53GHz

It constantly overheats if the fan isn't over open space. The battery life is awful and I'm on my second battery. It's fine if I need to be portable...but I don't these days. I have my own apartment. New games run super laggy and it blows. I was just trying to play Starcraft II and my CPU usage was nearly maxed out. I sadly know longer am up to date on computers. Need suggestions on what I should get.

[csquared]

How comfortable are you wit building your own system from parts?

[Greenday]

How comfortable are you wit building your own system from parts?

I've never done it before. Assuming it's mostly "Stick Board A into Slot B" and things are clearly labeled, I could do it. I'm decent with my hands.

[Moirae]

Ouch. Yeah, time to replace it.

Honestly, if you're a gamer, then you need the best you can afford.

My current rig has an i7-4771 350 ghz, asrock z87 extreme 6, 16 gigs ram, a 2 ter hdd, geforce gtx 770 and windows 8. The only thing I regret is the windows 8 and gtx 770. I can't play sims 3, not even on the lowest settings. The land is completely invisible and for some reason any water is pretty much just a blue static plain and no one knows why. And yes that includes the hardware manufacturers.

My rig can handle anything else I throw at it and was about $1200. Of course, it's also a desktop and I built it with parts I bought from newegg.

I would never ever buy a laptop for gaming unless it's specially created for gaming, in which case it will be much more expensive than a desktop due to the addition of a much more efficient cooling system than the typical laptop. I actually fried an $1800 laptop playing Everquest 2 all day once. As in... the inside melted. To fix it would have cost the same amount as a new computer so I just tossed it. A typical laptop cannot handle the heat.

It's much easier to build a rig than you'd think. Just research it on the net. If you build one, it will cost around half the price it would to buy it already built from a brand manufacturer.

[Greenday]

I can play Sims 3 on my current laptop and I don't have the issue you do. I'll see if any of my co-workers have experience putting computers together and then I might do it.

[Moirae]

Yeah, I know the problem. The problem is that EA won't develop proper drivers for it because they have the Sims 4 coming out in the summer. To them it would be a pointless waste of money and time. My graphics card is literally too advanced for the game.

[tedmchugh]

Check out TigerDirect, either on-line or instore. If your not familier with building your own, they have pre-built custom gaming rigs. But if you do plan on building your own, TigerDirect is the cheapest place to get your parts. Personaly, I feel that getting a large case and advanced mother board is the key to keeping your pc running for years. A large case will accomodate future upgrades. I've got an Intel Extreme board (about 2 years old) and its been running great, but when I upgrade down the road, I may opt for a MSI/EVGA gaming board.

My current rig: I7-350mhz, 16gigs Ram, EVGA 660ti-SLI, Win7, NZXR Phantom Case and fans galore.

I'm currently playing BF4 with all the settings set to high-ultimate. I may have to upgrade the GPUs when Grand Theft Auto comes out on PC in November.

[tedmchugh]

I've never done it before. Assuming it's mostly "Stick Board A into Slot B" and things are clearly labeled, I could do it. I'm decent with my hands.

It pretty much is plug "a into b" and it will save you $$$$. The hardest/tedious part is updating the drivers.

[sms001]

If you do decide to build your own, remember the caveat "Measure twice, cut once." In this case, be absolutely CERTAIN that your parts do, indeed, fit together. Common mistakes include the wrong MB for the processor, incorrect RAM, and insufficient power supply.

While a huge HD is nice, I'd probably defer an extra large one in favor of a smaller, faster one AND an SSD. You can always tack on more storage down the road.

You'll probably hear proponents of both Newegg and Tiger Direct. I've used both, lots, and don't really have a preference. Tiger seems to occasionally edge out NE with 'barebones' systems, and one of those might be a good place to start.

Hope you do it, and let us know how it goes.

[Geek King]

Cyber Power has some good base machines, and you can customize them on the site with a running total. I've ordered my last two gaming rigs from them, and they do a good job, if you don't want to take the time to build your own.

I work on PCs for a living, so I'd rather use my down time for gaming, and pay someone else build my computer and track down any installation problems.

[csquared]

NewEgg is offering "Bundles" of parts to assemble a machine. You can review the bundles to set something close to what you want. From there, use it as a shopping list to upgrade and swap out components that you may want. Of course, you will lose your "bundle discount" which is usually around $30 - $50. You can then take your parts list and shop other sites.

Down side to building your own machine is that it will not come with pre-installed (and licensed) OS and software.

[Greenday]

Eh, I already have MS Office so I'm good on that. Just need to upload Windows 7 cause 8 is awful.

One of my coworkers, who ends up doing tons of programming and had to help rebuild one of our super computers, obviously has a lot of experience so he said he'd help me. He's just not up to date on current hardware so that's what I need to figure out.

[Ophbalance]

If you stick with a newegg/tigerdirect mobo/cpu combo deal it would eliminate having to know which combination works well together. And at least for newegg, they tend to offer suggestions of what works well with what you're presently looking at. At least it's far harder to crack the CPU die than it was once upon a time when applying the heatsink .

As to what you should buy, is highly dependent upon budget. Spend as much as you can on CPU/GPU. I'd go with at least 16 Gigs of memory. I priced out a machine with an i7-4770k, Radeon GPU, 8 gigs RAM, 1TB drive, optical drive, 650 Watt PS, decent mobo and it came in at $1100.

[RichS]

I do agree on 'measure twice, cut once'. Also, whatever components you're thinking of buying, do as much research as you can, from testing sites and from customer reviews.

It is pretty much 'tab A - slot B', just much more fragile. The advantage of building your own is that you know what's going into it. Most big-volume computer companies have custom (proprietary) parts that can be a hassle when you look into upgrading the computer. The main disadvantage is that you are your own tech support, for the most part.

I tend to go for more 'bang for the buck'. I'm currently running an AMD FX-8350 with 8GB DDR3-1600 RAM on a Asus 970 chipset based board, with an EVGA overclocked GeForce GTX560Ti, and it's handled everything I've thrown at it. If I had to guess, I have about $900 invested in it. I'ts hard to say, I've been improving on this one for awhile.

One thing I'd recommend is an SSD as your main Windows drive - it's my first time with one, and I'd never go back. My computer boots faster than my tablet! For data, I have 2 big drives, one fast one for games and one that has the Windows folders (Documents, Pictures, Music, etc.) redirected to it, and handling my downloaded files and videos.

Place-wise, I've done NewEgg, TigerDirect, and mwave, but the past few times I've gone to MicroCenter for my components. There's a physical store about an hour away from me - I wait until I have a big list of stuff, then go down there to buy. They are very competitive with the other sites, and I have the things directly in my hands.

OS - If you have Windows 7, stick with it. It's not going away any time soon. That being said, Windows 8 isn't terrible, and it's gotten better with the updates. I'm running 8.1 Update on my 3-year old laptop, and I like it. I do bypass the Modern interface and boot directly to the desktop using a start menu program, which helps.