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Tell me what you think of this computer. Thinking of buying.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1344750&CatId=114
Thinking of getting this thing for when gw2 comes out this year. My current system is finally showing its wear and I'm in need of something with a kick. I liked everything on this system. I'm thinking maybe an upgrade to the video card. I don't know. I'm not completely illiterate when it comes to this but I do have alot to learn. Any help would be appreciated.
Comments
Want to buy a pig in a poke? For all those lines of specs, they only tell you what one part is in the entire machine. That typically means they used the cheapest parts that technicaly fit their claimed specs.
If you try to buy a prebuilt computer and upgrade it yourself, you might have to replace quite a bit. Can the power supply handle a stronger video card? Is there ample case airflow for a stronger video card? If you have to replace half of the machine to get what you want, you'd be better off just buying what you want in the first place.
Let's compare the parts to my build in post #13 of this thread:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/339439/prebuilt-gaming-rig-under-700.html
That gets you a demonstrably good power supply, and probably a good bit nicer than the prebuilt you're looking at. It also gets you a much better case that can handle whatever upgrades you might want to do in the future. It probably gets you a much better quality motherboard. It also gets you a video card nearly twice as fast. It gets you better memory. The processor isn't quite as nice.
Oh, and it's also cheaper.
Aside from what Quiz says, which is more or less true:
They pair a low-tier video card with a medium-tier CPU. The i5 line doesn't make a lot of sense to drop from the 2500 (you save ~9% on the price to lose ~12% on the speed), and you can't get a K-edition to overclock. Now being a system integrator they likely see a better deal (mostly because they presumably can buy in bulk, not at retail prices), but still - I doubt they are passing that much of a savings on to you.
The 6770 is the absolute lowest end GPU that I recommend. It isn't a bad card, there are a lot of cards that rate underneath it on the market, but for gaming, it's as low as I can comfortably recommend. It will provide fairly good performance in most every game, but will struggle if you try to crank the settings up too high. That being said, it doesn't make a lot of sense to pair this with an Intel Sandy Bridge - you could save about $100-$150 by going with an AMD quad-core, and put that extra money towards the GPU, and get as high as a 6870, which would make a remarkable difference in gaming. ~Most~ games are coded to where they are more GPU-bound than CPU-bound, and an increase in GPU power will make more difference than CPU. Trade a little CPU power (when it doesn't really matter) for a little GPU power, and you make large overall net effect in the system.
For what it's worth, by going with an AMD system as opposed to a properly done Core i5 2500K with a P67 motherboard, you might save $150. But by going with AMD as opposed to a low bin Sandy Bridge quad core together with what is probably a low end H61 motherboard (if it were nice, then why don't they tell you so?), you probably only save about $50 or so. But that's how you end up with a Sandy Bridge processor only slightly faster than an AMD quad core, rather than a lot faster.
Another thing I'd worry about is cards like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131454
A Juniper GPU chip won't perform like it should in a desktop if you saddle it with DDR3 memory rather than the proper GDDR5. Losing 2/3 of the memory bandwidth has consequences in a chip that is meaningfully limited by memory bandwidth. Does the prebuilt computer you're looking at have the proper GDDR5 memory? Probably. But they don't say, so you don't know.