Cool, thanks to both of you for the feedback!
You can get 2 months of free Xbox pass to play sea of thieves (new subscribers only) plus others for less than $2. This link tells you how:
For some reason it won’t let me add it to my shopping cart. When I click on “Buy now” it takes me to a page saying my shopping cart is empty.
Dell has a XPS with a i5-8400 CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and a GTX1080 for $1100. If you need a GPU, this is a great deal.
/me waits for a news story now about a mountain of dell systems sitting in the middle of nowhere with their gpus stripped out.
1100 bucks would be a lot of cheese for a 1080 but if you were in the market for a new system that wouldn’t be so bad.
I always worry about expandability with those pre-builts though. Particularly with drive bays and SATA connections on the motherboard.
Yup, 16 should be the minimum for a gaming system these days. But the cell phones are eating up too much RAM and driving up the price.
The miners are already paying prices like that for just 1080s though
Well, they cray, so…
(but I do take your point–if people really want to get their hands on one for mining, they could do that.)
Dell in particular is bad about that.
Yes, dells are made pretty much to just fit what they ship with, and just enough power. By the end my dell had the panel off the side and a psu sitting on top
The XPS8930 all looks pretty standard and replaceable except maybe the PSU. M2 PCI-e SSD, standard 3.5" drive, DDR4 RAM, etc. Not sure what you’d put in the thing that takes more power than a GTX1080.
You can get 16G ram on that system for $100 more. I’m not quite desperate yet, but I’d really LOVE a new system right now, and I have the money to burn on it.
Also, they claim it’s easy enough to add crap to the system (I’ve ONLY built my own machines since my first 386 PC, so I have no ideas how bad a dell is…) Crap I’m so tempted…
Would you be worried about specter/meltdown enough to NOT buy this machine based on the CPU? Is the motherboard not sucky enough that I could slot in another CPU next year?
Considering that 8GB of DDR4 retails starting around $85 these days, getting it from Dell isn’t a bad idea.
Spectre/Meltdown basically mean the CPU will run 5-10% slower than before. That’s about it. Nobody knows if Dell will support 9th gen intel CPUs in this motherboard. I certainly wouldn’t bet on it, assume you’ll be keeping that i5-8400 forever. Which again is fine, it’s just a bit of lost speed.
The XPS8930 is actually a really nice little machine. It’s a microATX and the full dimensions are 15" tall, 7" wide, 14" deep. It’s not teeny-tiny like a NUC, but it’s much smaller than a standard mid-tower.
On another note, you can save $100 by dropping to a GTX 1070ti, which is an even better deal. The 1070ti is a fantastic performer and the difference isn’t worth a hundred bucks. End price with 16GB RAM and the 1070ti is $1062. Note the cheapest 1070ti on Amazon is $650 and the cheapest 1080 is $700.
As I recall they also glue in those prebuilt components - at least they used to
Nothing is glued on this computer, it’s all screwed together. The PSU, DVD drive, case and motherboard all look custom but everything else is standard connectors. You can replace the memory, SSD, 3.5" drive, etc.
Welp, I ordered one. Only a 2 month wait to actually get it (they ship at the end of may, eeeesh.) I’m looking forward to playing my backlog of games I purchased when I thought I had a good enough rig to run them, but didn’t…
Yeah, the only problems I ran into were making things fit. Glad to see they’ve improved on that in the last 8 years.