My understanding is that this is a dell wide thing, as they own alienware.
In fairness though I think this just applies to the 2nd year plus standard warranty.
I had the gold level warranty for the 1st year and there was a problem with the keyboard.
They sent an engineer out who diagnosed it, couldn’t fix it so replaced it.
Within a week.
After 10 years of only owning laptops, I’m finally looking to buy a desktop again. I guess the timing isn’t exactly the best, but there’s not much I can do about that.
I’m looking at a budget of around $1000, but could go over a bit if it makes sense. I mostly play strategy games, so am hoping to find something that will let me play whatever the shiny new Total War game is for the next couple of years.
I guess I could be convinced to build something, but it sounds like that’s not even necessarily the most economic move at the moment. I’ve looked over a couple of sites linked here, that BLD one looks interesting, but am mostly confronted with a long list of numbers and acronyms that mean next to nothing to me. A MSI Z370-A PRO LGA 1151 sure sounds impressive.
So, any guidance would be much appreciated.
Pre-built is definitely the way to go economically right now; video card, RAM, and SSD prices are all fucked up right now for a variety of reasons.
I think Ryzen 2 is around the corner, while Intel just refreshed fairly recently. If you’re more of an AMD man, may be worth waiting a bit longer, but Intel is still crazy solid for just about everything except cheap many-core setups. Sorry, in a meeting, this response sucks.
You can get a pretty decent Dell for around that price for all the reasons Armando mentioned. DIY is completely fucked-up due to GPU pricing, but the big OEMs have their supply of components locked-in way in advance.
Ryzen 2 comes out April 19th with a 10% performance bump, and it is not vulnerable to Meltdown. No news on how it addresses Spectre. I would certainly wait for that at minimum.
Intel has a Coffee Lake refresh coming out that supposedly fixes Meltdown and also has some Spectre mitigations. No release date yet though. I would not buy an Intel CPU without the Meltdown fix unless it was a hell of a good deal.
Oh, I had no idea about any of that. I’m not in a big rush really, so sounds like I should hold off for a bit longer. Thanks!
Arise!
So, we might be in the market for at least one, if not two, PC replacements. My wife and I both have PCs dating back now five years or so. I’ve replaced the video card in mine (now a 970) and the hard drive (now a 850 EVO 1TB SSD) but she’s still running an archaic 480 and rocking a 1TB winchester. Both are i5 3570k with 16GB RAM.
Now, both of these were purchased pre-built because tat the time I did not have the time to build two at once, and we got them from Digital Storm. They’ve been very, very good, but are finally getting a bit long in the tooth, her’s in particular. I’m not thrilled with the idea of just getting her a new GPU at this point, for a lot of reasons. My quandary is that because I haven’t had to worry about things getting obsolete in terms of running games and stuff, over the past few years, I’m clueless as to what would be a reasonable replacement, something that would provide at least a modest improvement in some areas and at the very least a more modern version of the same performance.
Building machines via configurators (I could do a DIY effort but it seems the cost savings are minimal) at Digital Storm and the like, it seems that everything costs a freakin’ fortune. Going with whatever the mainstream i5, 16GB, and even a smaller 500GB SSD + winchester build ends up topping two grand if you get a 1070; the only other options that appear at all viable are the 1060s with more than 3GB, but it seems that 8GB video RAM is the new minimum, at least, some say that.
So, is that what I’m looking at? About two grand for a reasonable replacement? I would actually prefer to go with only SSD storage, as I’m done with mechanical drives as far as I can be. But that drives the price up another hundred or so at least. And with new video cards coming out, the nearly four hundred bucks most places want for the 1070s seems like maybe not the best investment, but I just don’t know.
Any ideas? I’m looking to get/build a machine or machines that will give me another five year or so run. I don’t need 4K, I use a 1440p monitor and it’s fine, and so far I’ve been able to run most everything the way I want it, though some fancier new stuff is starting to push it a bit.
It doesn’t have to cost that much. The i3 is the same or faster, I repeat actually faster, than both the i5 or the i7 in games. The reason it tends to hit higher single core GHz. It’s quad core too. Intel b360 chipset, don’t bother with z370. Basic thermaltake micro ATX case and bronze semi modular 500 watt PSU, $110 total.
Of course, I’m just describing my own preferences, and yours could vary :). I’ll be interested to see if you can trim costs though.
I almost always, always, buy used or refurbished nowadays.
Corsair makes nice and quiet machines.
Also check out the Inspiron Gaming Desktop line.
If you want a 1070 you may well be better off getting a low end i3 and adding a 1070 yourself; for some reason Dell has really restricted the low end upgrade options so you can’t add SSD to build, which is a big pain.
There’s a ton of gaming desktops listed at Newegg (i don’t shop at Newegg anymore, but Amazon’s in-house searches mixing up of sponsored searches and third party sales searches makes it almost useless now). Those desktops are ugly as sin, but there’s a lot of options <2k.
I agree 2K is way more than needed to put together a great gaming PC these days, but I don’t agree with going for an i3. Being slightly faster in existing games is always a bad trade versus future proofing yourself against the next wave. Ryzen will almost certainly be used in next gen consoles which will encourage far more CPU utilization and thread heavy engine design.
As a bonus, the success of Ryzen has pushed down prices for many core processors a lot so I can’t imagine settling for a 4 core i3 unless you have an extremely limited budget. 8 core, 16 thread Ryzen R7 2700s are pretty affordable. So are 1TB SSDs these days. Looking over at Newegg, I can put together a full Ryzen 7 2700 system with 16GB RAM, 960GB PCI-E M.2 SSD, and a GeForce 1070 Ti for under $1400. A similar 6 core i7 Intel build would be maybe ~$100 more. That’s quite a bit less than $2000 with lots of room to cut the price by stepping down to a smaller SSD + spinning data drive, a GeForce 1060 or AMD video card, a cheaper mobo, etc.
Thanks for the reply and the opportunity to debate :).
Civ 6 test at Toms. $119 i3-8100 time between turns: 14.9 seconds. $519 i7-8086K time between turns: 12.3 seconds.
Multi-core thread-heavy games! was the talk of the town… in 2011. The PS4 and Xbox 1 were on the horizon, and the Xbox 1 ended up shipping with eight cores. Heck, it was the talk of the town in 2006 when the PS3 came out. It’s never happened. Sure there’s a few games… actually there’s not. There’s one game. Ashes of the Singularity, which you and I don’t play. The high core-count has gotten to the point that even the review websites, which have a financial interest in keeping people upgrading, are making comments like “this is silly, unless you’re playing games while recording 4K video and transcoding it to MP4 and uploading it to Twitch and doing other stuff too.”
That was a bit of a rant. In more direct terms, consoles will never have processors that cost more than about $90 which is what an i3 at $120 consumer price works out to, because console prices tend to max out at $400-600 dollars. A new i3 today such as an 8100 will match the next gen consoles.
I do agree that the success of Ryzen has made a big difference. The i3 now a true quad core and is a great improvement.
Most games, like FPS, RPG, and action, which are the dominant AAA type, tend to have a single-thread critical path. Sure extra cores help with some off-path items like physics, but they end up 2-3 FPS faster.
I just searched for the most recent CPU review I could find, which ended up being Tom’s Hardware’s review of the Pentium G56400 (a $64 CPU, being reviewed as a low cost gaming CPU - spolier: it’s fine).
Notice the i3 is at the top of every chart. Also notice what we’re talking about - Far Cry 5 at 102 frames per second. WTF? 102 FPS? I have a 60 Hz IPS monitor and 40-year old eyes. In other words, games will need to get much more graphically impressive to tax that i3 system down to 60Hz.
All of the above said, buying high-end hardware is also fine. A lot of us on this forum are at a point in our lives that we simply want higher-end stuff. That’s ok. Spend your money on things that make you happy. I like the idea of a high end gaming PC, and that 5% difference in turn time in Civ 6 is worth more than 5% cost of parts… I want to maximize my time and not wait for turns. I also have an Oculus Rift - but an i3 and GTX 1070 are also fine for that.
I just bought this, pick it up next week (from Best Buy). It’s the size of a console with a 1070.
The RX480 isn’t obsolete if you have a 1080p monitor and it should perform pretty well at 1440p also, just not ultra quality and maxed 60fps. Nvidia is announcing their next-gen later this month so I would certainly wait on that-- you may be able to buy a 1160 for $300 that performs like a 1070 does today.
Crap, I thought they were delayed.
Yep, announcements this month. Rumors are 1180 in September, 1170 October, and 1160 November. Performance will undoubtedly be exactly what anyone would expect if they’ve been paying attention.
I haven’t been… what’s pencilled in for the 1170?
Wouldn’t the 1170 be about on par with a 1080, but with lower power requirements?
1180 would be on par with a 1080ti.
Right?
No, going by historical precedent the 1170 should be on par with a 1080ti, and the 1180 quite a bit faster than that.
Roughly equal Nvidia performance chart
| 11 | 10 | 9 | 7 |
|1150| 1060| 970| 780ti| Smokes 1080p, OK at 1440p. RX-480 is on this row too.
|1160| 1070|980ti| n/a| Great 1440p card
|1170|1080ti| n/a| n/a| Smokes 1440p, OK at 4k
|1180| n/a| n/a| n/a| Smokes 4k?
That CPU is pretty fast. You’ve got a good amount of RAM. I know you said you want a whole new machine, but even for her, I think all you need is a new video card and you’re good to go for another 2 years at least.