Gaming PC recommendations

[SGGG2]

Alienware is fine. However, no one here is going to recommend a pre-built PC. That's $300 (or more) you could pocket or put towards a better graphics card.

[NormalFish]

Bumping this thread..

I decided to put off my purchase, for a bit longer, so I could get something a little snazzier.

Are the Alienware computers any good? I'm looking for something more in the $1500 range. I want to be able to play most PS4/XBox One games, in 60fps. I don't see why I should get a gaming PC, if I don't go for that.

I can't promise this is still true, but Alienware used to be an order of magnitude more expensive than their competitors, let alone building your own.

I scanned over the thread and might have missed it, but you should really check out http://pcpartpicker.com/ and figure it out with their tool. http://www.logicalincrements.com/ and /r/buildapc are useful if you're not sure which brands to give preference to.

[evil_ash_xero]

Well, I'm probably going to get a pre-built. I just don't want to get into all this extra stuff.

So, as long as it does what I'm wanting, and is uprgradeable, I think it should suit my needs.

Sorry for not being very picky here.

[Guspaz]

Alienware is Dell now: their stuff isn't overpriced anymore, it's just typically priced gaming stuff. Sometimes there are sales. Just compare it to other similar gaming companies for an idea about if something's a good deal.

[RGB32E]

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/10serie ... e-gtx-1080

The newly announced 10 series GeForce cards present a very compelling price/performance ratio! Trouble with graphics cards is that they tend not to drop in price significantly over their model year/life. There are exceptions to this of course - ATI dropped the price of its GTX 970 competitor after its release.

[NormalFish]

A modern i5 and the new 1070 should be able to run pretty much anything at max settings and solid framerates. Emulation shouldn't be too bad, but you might want an i7 if that's something you're big on. There are companies that will sell "custom" PCs and ship them to you prebuilt and troubleshooted, which may be cheaper than the total preconceived units from places like dell. I don't have any experience with either, though, so I don't want to drop any names.

[Guspaz]

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/10serie ... e-gtx-1080

The newly announced 10 series GeForce cards present a very compelling price/performance ratio! Trouble with graphics cards is that they tend not to drop in price significantly over their model year/life. There are exceptions to this of course - ATI dropped the price of its GTX 970 competitor after its release.

That's a good point, buyers might want to hold off just a little bit longer until the 1070/1080 are on the market, both because they represent a substantial improvement in performance and power efficiency, and because they'll likely cause price drops on the previous generation of cards.

[evil_ash_xero]

About how much would a PC, with this new card run, you think?

[CkRtech]

For the cards alone at retail -

The GTX 1080 drops on May 27th with the GTX 1070 to follow on June 10th. The 1080 is priced at $599 while the 1070 will cost $379.

[NormalFish]

About how much would a PC, with this new card run, you think?

Hard to say on the premade side, but I think I could probably put together a box (not including monitors/peripherals) for about 800$ without skimping on any parts. I'd guess 900-1000 premade, based on that, but you might be able to score a deal since I imagine they can source some things on the cheap.

[Guspaz]

The 1070 has an MSRP that is $50 more than the 970.

Alienware's machines with a 970 start at $1200, and you can get it for $1000 if you buy an Oculus Rift.

The 1070 might be $50 more expensive.

[NormalFish]

The 1070 has an MSRP that is $50 more than the 970.

Alienware's machines with a 970 start at $1200, and you can get it for $1000 if you buy an Oculus Rift.

The 1070 might be $50 more expensive.

That's probably because they're using HARDCORE GAMING RAM/MoBo/case and an unnecessarily large PSU. an i5 for ~250$ and a 1070 for 350$ or so should not equate to a 1200$ PC.

[Guspaz]

In that case it's a small form factor machine. But if you spec out all the parts, you're not going to end up that much less than their $1000.

Including a miniITX motherboard and chassis and SFX power supply (for a rough comparison), I get $915.67 on pcpartpicker, with a $40 mail-in rebate, if you trust those.

So, you do save around $85 by building it yourself, or even $125 if you count the mail-in rebate. But you don't have any warranty (the Alienware has a 1-year on-site warranty), and you have to buy from five different online stores to get that price. And then you've got to spend your own time building it.

Of course, if you don't want the Rift, then that Alienware costs $200 extra, so I'm really not doing a fair comparison here

There definitely is money to be saved by building it yourself, and that's the approach that I've always taken, but I definitely get the appeal of just buying a system that is ready to use out-of-the-box. It's just a hassle-free solution if you don't have the time or knowledge to do it yourself.

[evil_ash_xero]

I'm gonna wait until that new card drops...I'll save up some coins...and I'll come here and run some specs past you guys. Let me know if the system will be able to keep up, for the next batch of years or not.

[Ed Oscuro]

I have one comment about DIY versus prebuilt PCs and warranties: For many people a long parts warranty doesn't matter, especially if you pay extra for it up front - the statistical model the big brands use for their warranties is rigged so that it's generating lots of income, like the house take in a casino. The last prebuilt RMA for a prebuilt PC I can remember was a replacement harddrive for a PC which was just months from the end of its extended warranty - the replacement hard drive was much bigger and newer, but it was still small and basically obsolete, and so not worth the hassle - certainly not worth the cost of the extended warranty. Relying on an RMA for a prebuilt PC (or any other premade item, like a monitor) also forces you to wait and to accept whatever decision the manufacturer makes. The only reason that the old PC got a bigger hard drive in the RMA was simply because it was the cheapest way for Compaq to fulfill the contract; there's plenty of horror stories about laptops, monitors, and so on where people know there's some kind of engineering flaw - but companies don't save as much money by issuing a recall as they do by spinning your wheels on the RMA process and working through their stock of old parts that get cheaper by the day, until there's no more warranty left, or you give up. If you have built your own PC, you can make the decision about how to replace a part - you might even roll in an upgrade at the same time. I've found the RMA process for individual components these days has been pretty good, and a component like a motherboard or a SSD can have a warranty period of as many as 5 or even 10 years (especially for some SSDs) - and in this case you don't pay extra for it, so it's just offering you flexibility and extra service, should you wish it. You're not locked into having to accept that you lose warranty and service for an entire system if the brand won't do the right thing and recall a defective component that you know will continue to cause trouble in the future.

I have a similar thing to say about graphics cards. I've realized that it doesn't pay to worry too much about "future proofing" a system. It generally doesn't make sense.

Let's look at pricing for various graphics cards: You have a "mainstream" card at $150 (something like the often-insulted GTX 960), an "enthusiast" card at $300+ (GTX 970), and then you have the "for rich kids" stuff that can run $500 and up. You don't get double the performance for double the price - but you do often get more than double the power draw for double the performance. Just as importantly, expensive cards won't run any longer than cheaper cards. They have some extra headroom for performance but in the future you can meet any rising demands by just getting another $150 card to replace your current one. That's roughly what I did when I replaced my 2009-2010 Radeon HD 5850 (and that actually cost $260 or so back in the day - and while it still runs perfectly and looks new, it just isn't powerful enough anymore). Not only will you save money and continue to run a cooler and less power-hungry system, but you will get a brand-new warranty period, better driver support for the new card, and any new hardware or software features that a new series of cards can support, which even the top-of-the-line from an older series is simply too old for. The last drivers for the Radeon HD 5850 can't run waterfalls in Skyrim correctly, but AMD has said it has "mature" drivers; in other news, it has reached the predetermined end-of-support date, and won't be updated anymore. nVidia seems just slightly better about long-term driver support, but you still don't get endless driver support.

A very good reason to get a more expensive card is because you need its extra performance now - like for a higher resolution or more fps, or both - otherwise you're paying for performance that you might use eventually, when instead you could just wait for a future product and save some money, and still have much more performance than even a top-of-the-line old card could offer. That's true at every tier, too - the upcoming GTX 1070 and 1080 both look considerably more powerful than the 970 and 980.

Recent years have been a bit confusing since it looks as if there's been a constant stream of very big - bigger than historically expected - improvements in graphics cards tech. Regardless of whether manufacturers continue to deliver huge improvements or not, it won't make sense to try and buy the most expensive stuff now. If you buy more card than you need, it'll still be older by the time you get around to needing it, and it'll probably have been leapfrogged in many ways in a few years' time.

On the games side, the PS4K doesn't look set to push PC gaming that much (rumors say that its performance over the PS4 may be just 20-30% in tough cases), and in any case nobody can force you to game at 4K if you don't want to - 1080p versions will be a thing for a long time to come, as will 1440p. Enough people are still playing games at 1080p and 60fps that it's pretty much mandatory for developers to continue supporting this, especially with so many laptops locked in to these specs. Not to mention, there's an awful lot of games out there that deliberately target toasters and potatoes, being lots of fun without breaking the bank.

[Exidna]

Just as importantly, expensive cards won't run any longer than cheaper cards. They have some extra headroom for performance but in the future you can meet any rising demands by just getting another $150 card to replace your current one.

It really depends how long you plan on keeping the card.

NVIDIA typically moves performance down one tier with each successive generation.
So a 680 ($500) is roughly equaled in performance by a 770 ($400) and a 960. ($200)
If you were buying $200 GPUs every generation, you would have spent an extra $100 and had worse performance than a 680 for three years. (GPUs are typically on an ~18 month cycle)

You do get architectural improvements and things like increased memory on top of that with the newer cards, so sometimes the newer cards will outperform the old.
An example of that would be the new 1000-series GPUs, where their simultaneous multi-projection feature brings a huge performance improvement for VR applications, far beyond the card's raw speed improvements.

And actually, it looks as though the 1000-series may be bucking the trend, and jumping two tiers instead of one this time around.
It looks like the 1070 is going to offer 980Ti performance, rather than 980 performance.
The X70 card is typically where to go for the best balance between price/performance. The X60 card is nearly always half, or a bit less than half the performance of the X70 card, for half the cost.

After a few generations of buying X70 cards which have lasted me at least 2-3 years each, I bought a 960 last year and I'm already looking to upgrade now.
I'm torn between buying a 1070/1080 or waiting for the inevitable Titan/1080Ti.
Though you are paying more for those cards if you're looking at performance/$, I'd like to move up from 1080p to a 1440p display. (4K will still require SLI)

[Ed Oscuro]

If you're worried about losing performance compared to card X for Y years, then just buy the most expensive card and replace it as soon as possible to maximize performance!
In seriousness, I get your point, but it's a relatively rare case. I was worried about this kind of thing when I jumped on the 960 instead of waiting for the 1000 series, which I already knew about, but resale will actually reduce the pain here. Buying a $500 card now is a significant and unavoidable cost, and that's more likely to be overkill (and you stand to lose more in resale value) than there are cases where spending the $500 would actually be coming out ahead (all the people buying cheaper cards aren't wrong, and that's still true if we substitute the mid-tier for the lower high end). Few people actually are buying cards every 18 months, and those that are probably are looking to meet a specific need which they don't need to carefully weigh.

So let's think carefully about any unstated assumptions in your post. One likely one is this: The user's maxing out the performance of their card even when they first install it.

My answer to this is simply that this isn't like what people experience when they buy a new card - they are most likely still framerate limited (in which case they will just need to turn down settings or wait for the hardware to catch up) or they are already comfortable with their performance. What happens after that point? I haven't observed performance requirements to ramp up like this would suggest (although I certainly don't play the most GPU-intensive games, but I'm also definitely not CPU bound), and this is why I mentioned console ports and resolutions / framerates. If you are going for 4K gaming, then the $200 option is definitely not going to cut it in this generation! I was able to get roughly 6 years of use out of a $250 card, and it actually turned in some decent results on modern games because I was playing at 1200p (16:10). "Worse performance than a 680 for three years" isn't very meaningful without knowing what it's being used for, if indeed it's being used. It is difficult to come out ahead by not buying enough capacity, but I think once you've figured out what your current requirements are, that's actually a pretty good starting place. Additionally, like you also pointed out in a recap of my post, there's other factors that can conspire to devalue that old investment vs. buying fresh - I'd also add that reselling lets you recover some value from an older card. It's not like the old days where old stuff is just crap and totally obsolete every few years; the GPU market is probably poised to start looking a bit more like markets where old gear holds value for a surprisingly long time. We're not there yet, but I suspect that an "old" card today would be worth a lot more than an equally old card would have in the 2000s. This will especially be true if we're stuck in another long period with no progress past the 16nm production node.

I think "how long you want to keep the card" assumes some tricky things about the kind of budgeting a person is doing. I think it's more reasonable to say something like "I have only so much budget now to get what I want." In my case, I decided that 1440p and 144Hz + a 960 would meet my needs better than a lousy monitor + an overkill card. This has proven to be the right decision for me thus far.

Of course I was worried about an example like you gave - that I had gotten impatient and bought the 960 when I should have waited. But, like they say in the camera world, the best GPU is the one you have with you. Plus I can still resell it if I decide to upgrade.

I also disagree about your definition of the relative power of the cards; Tom's Hardware reviewed the 960 and it typically had performance significantly higher than 50% of a 970. Tech Report called the 960 half of a 980 (and that, of course, was still one of the better tech buys on the market). It's no secret that companies all across tech (from CPUs to digital cameras) use scarcity and diminishing bang for the buck to squeeze extra money from rich buyers. You don't get double the utility out of a $3500 camera than from a $1000 one, and indeed in most cases even a decent cell phone camera will be competitive, but the features that come with the more expensive units are worth the price according to the market segment they're aimed at.

[Einzelherz]

Here I am, chugging along on a 6850 while you fat cats are eating caviar on your fancy modern cards.

[Exidna]

You're right, I was mistaken about the X60 range, the comparison is against the X80 not the X70.
Looking at it again, they do work out better than the X70 range if you're purely looking at performance-per-dollar.
However I'd still make the argument that they're worse value than the X70 cards, because they just don't have the performance to last. You'll want to replace them much sooner.

As for resale value, I wouldn't buy any GPU with resale in mind.
Sure, if you spend less to begin with, you'll "lose" less money on it, but don't think that you're going to get a good amount of money back on any GPU once it's no longer current.
It's not just about performance, but features too. I'd never recommend that anyone buy a previous-generation GPU unless they get it at a significant discount.
In some newer games, because of the features that are being used, the GTX 960 is managing to outperform the GTX 780 - which is very different from what the raw performance of the card suggests it should be, and how older games test.


I've no idea what you're trying to say about performance in your post.
That if you only play old games, or you're the kind of person that only plays DOTA/CS:GO and nothing else, you won't need to upgrade you GPU?
I wouldn't say that any GPU is overkill if you want to play current-gen games, even if you're playing at 1080p.
And once you move beyond 1080p, you need the fastest GPU that you can get.

As developers are pushing current-gen console hardware more, the requirements for games are going up.
While a GTX 960 was enough to keep many of last year's games above 60 FPS at 1080p, most new games I've played this year are struggling to hit 60 FPS now.
Most recently that's been the new Doom and Dark Souls III - both of which both drop to about 50 FPS even at the lowest settings.
Fallout 4 was a disaster, and I haven't even dared to try Hitman, Rise of the Tomb Raider, or Quantum Break.
And this is all before the new PS4 (and Xbox?) console launches, which is said to double its performance.

More than just a new GPU, I'm thinking that I want to pick up a G-Sync display to go along with it now, because it seems to be increasingly challenging to achieve a constant 60 FPS in new games, no matter what hardware you're using.
If only there were G-Sync televisions though. It's the size that's kept me from buying one so far.


I'm curious to know what $250 GPU you stuck with for the past six years.
Best I can figure is that it would have been a GTX 465, and I wouldn't have been happy with that performance at all, if I was playing new releases for the time.
But last-gen was quite different from this one. Console hardware was significantly slower than PC hardware, not just a little bit slower as it is today.
I was able to stick with a GTX 570 for quite some time back then as it was fast enough to handle the majority of ports at 1080p60.
Late-generation games did begin to struggle though, and by the time new consoles shipped, I had to upgrade.

I initially bought a 970 but replaced it with a 960 because:

1. The 970 wasn't fast enough to run everything locked at 1080p60 without turning the graphics down anyway
2. The 970 didn't have the video decoding hardware that I needed (since the 960 launched later, it added 10-bit, 4K, H.265, and VP9 decoding)

So I bought a 960 to hold me over until the new generation of cards.

It's not like the old days where old stuff is just crap and totally obsolete every few years; the GPU market is probably poised to start looking a bit more like markets where old gear holds value for a surprisingly long time. We're not there yet, but I suspect that an "old" card today would be worth a lot more than an equally old card would have in the 2000s. This will especially be true if we're stuck in another long period with no progress past the 16nm production node.

That's not likely to happen any time within the next 5 years at least.
GPUs are extremely parallel, so if they hit architectural or process limits, they can simply throw more cores at the problem.
Things don't seem to be slowing down any time soon - if anything they're speeding up. That's why NVIDIA is able to beat the $1000 Titan X performance with a $380 card not even 18 months after its release, using fewer cores and transistors.

[Guspaz]

Maxwell was a massive improvement in power efficiency (and thus performance), but used the same 28nm process as Kepler. That was because nVidia knew the 16nm migration wasn't happening any time soon, and so they spent a lot of resources doing a major architectural upgrade on the by then much more mature process.

We can likely expect similar improvements over Pascal in the future, since I also doubt they'll be moving to 10nm any time soon.

[Ed Oscuro]

Exidna: The strategy is buying something that supports your hardware now, with acceptable headroom for the future. Not resale value, not tiers. I'm in agreement with your argument that always teetering on the edge of obsolescence, trying to eke extra life out of hardware that doesn't meet your needs, is not a good strategy. "Tiers" work in order to vaguely gauge respective performance, assuming a level playing field, but now you're saying that you think the 960 won't last for reasons - good reasons - that simple generational-based arguments don't support. We're ~2 18 month cycles out from the 2013 launch of the Geforce 780 series cards, and many people are just now comfortable with upgrading - so far that's decent enough lifespan for high performance - but this cycle we're also seeing the historical cycle breaking because of the shift to higher resolution and higher framerate monitors. Once 4K and/or higher framerate monitors become commonplace we'll very likely have a long period of stability in that kind of performance demands. The new GPUs are being touted as bringing 4K support at reasonable power draw and pricing, so mass market support is shifting to higher framerates and resolutions, so hopefully this argument will be academic for a few years, once again, and people can use "tiers" to predict the future again, until something else comes along and breaks the model.

Consoles aren't driving PC graphics (PS4K will bring improvements much closer to 20-30% over a PS4's performance, not 100% for a doubling; Microsoft is sitting out the mid-cycle upgrade for now). If anything, PCs are driving consoles, as consoles have lost their historic price competitiveness, probably forever. As for PC games...well, it depends. You mention some of the more difficult-to-run games - personally I'm often satisfied to show 'recommended settings' the finger and turn off AA and some special effects, and that solves any performance deficit. On the other hand it's been nearly 10 years since I did any competitive online playing with a power-hungry FPS, so naturally I won't criticize hardware choices meant to give and edge there.

It doesn't really matter if I buy a 960 or a 980 Ti today - what's appropriate hardware for 1440p@144Hz or 4K@60Hz? How much do needs change in even one generation? We've just seen a perfect storm in market offerings: A jump in pixel counts to at least 170% that of 1080p - easily doubled by aiming for 120Hz - is not served well by GPUs that are stuck on an old 28nm process node. Even the highest-end Maxwell products can limit the performance of some games, a situation I hope the new GPUs start to make up. However I think the recent talk about good value for money in GPUs - compared to old offerings - is undercut by the increased baseline demands. If everybody was sticking to 1080p60 this wouldn't have been at issue; in the old days, any performance jump like this would have been mostly software-driven, with many of those games designed to target current hardware anyway; in a pinch gamers could always lower their CRT monitor's resolution or framerate.

For my part, I've been able to absolutely max many of the games I've played at 1440p and 144Hz, including the highest settings; some other stuff is locked at 60Hz and more GPU power wouldn't do much. Of demanding games, I've not got a ton of experience, but I did play through Wolfenstein: The New Order and The Old Blood with an unlocked framerate at 1440p and it was just as fluid as I could have wished. I'm a bit tempted to jump onto the Pascal wagon, but I won't upgrade until I start to see both a call for more performance than what I have, *and* I see an offering I think gives good performance headroom for the money. And, incidentally, once the market starts stabilizing again, with smoother performance from generation to generation (though we might have to wait for a cycle past Pascal, in order to get the memory power crisis under control) the price and performance of older cards should likewise stabilize, and resale value along with that.

As for my $250 investment for 6 years, that card was starting to get embarrassing in games like Resident Evil Revelations 2 (which is uniquely a power hog for the RE series, notably worse than RE6 for some reason), Lichdom: Battlemage performance was just as marginal if not worse, and yet we're still talking about generally much better than 30fps performance with some predictable slowdown and stutter (as expected from such an old card). I've always been happy to flick off suggested settings that offend common sense when it allows me to save a few dollars. But, again, it's noteworthy that card was never asked to do more than 1080p and 60fps, just as my current card won't be asked to do more than 1440p and 144Hz (which, admittedly, is a hell of a jump, but the 960 is probably well more than 400% the capability of the HD 5850).

Anyhow, we'll see how long it is before I really need to upgrade. If I need to upgrade soon, it'll be because the 960 was always a stopgap, but at the moment I'm surprisingly happy with it. Of course if you won't be happy with even a 980, then by all means get a 1070 or a more powerful card.

@ Guspaz: The Maxwell performance enhancements were a one-time deal. If anything, the lack of single-precision performance in Maxwell shows that some things were sacrificed for the sake of making that big gain, while Pascal looks set to return nVidia to competitiveness in that area. There is another area that's likely to see some improvement past Pascal, at least in the mainstream of nVidia cards - the movement from GDDR5X to HBM2. Power and bandwidth usage is starting to become critical in cards, and HBM2 should help address both those problems.

[SuperDeadite]

As a cheap-ass I currently have:

i3-4340 (3.6ghz)
MSI GTX770 Lightning 2gb (bought used 2 years ago for $200)
8gb RAM
Win 7 64

I recently played through Rise of the Tomb Raider on this machine, and at High settings, I average about 40-50fps in most areas on High Settings at 1080p. The larger hubs areas would get a bit of stutter, but it never dropped below 30fps. Now, this performance isn't pc-elite worthy, but the game looks way better, and runs smoother then the Xbone version does. So for someone going from consoles, to PCs for the first time, this is still a nice improvement.

Now that Doom 4 actually looks like it's worth playing, I plan to snag a i7-4790K soon, as the i3 isn't going to cut it for this one, and now I have a need to upgrade. Since the GTX1080 really does look like one hell of a deal, probably go for one near X-mas or so. The 770's 2gb limit is finally starting to show it's limits, but in general as long as I can beat the consoles and have a playable frame-rate I'm generally happy.

For a new PC gamer, decide what you actually want to play first, then choose your hardware.

[Ji-L87]

The new 1080 and perhaps specifically the 1070 cards are very interesting to me.

I'm currently running a GTX 780 that I picked up used last summer when I didn't feel like shilling out for a 970 but wanted to upgrade from my 560ti.
It too has started to feel a bit aged, however, and I recently read that the 960 sometimes outperforms the 780 in new games, despite raw numbers would suggest otherwise.

However, my entire PC is getting a bit old at this point and it's probably time for me to start thinking about putting together a new one sometime. Perhaps later this year, or next year. I mean, I'm still running the 1st gen i7 (which loves power and to produce heat) and with my current case, my front USB ports are not plugged in as they're usb 3.0, whereas my motherboard only supports that through the two dedicated ports in the back, with only usb 2.0 connectors on the motherboard (and they don't match physically).

Still, it's been serving me well.

But back on track, I'm currently running 1080p monitors and to be honest I'm perfectly fine with that. Maybe I'd like my main display to be slightly larger and have a bit more resolution, however I have no need for 4K at the moment. So if the 1070 turns out to be the perfect card for maxed out 1080p 60fps gaming, I'd probably like to jump at that.
It's all GTX 1080 talk at the moment, but hopefully we'll get some benchmarks and reviews of the 1070 soon...

[Guspaz]

It's all GTX 1080 talk at the moment, but hopefully we'll get some benchmarks and reviews of the 1070 soon...

The 1070 should perform at 70-75% of the 1080, based on the released specs.