Whoa, what the hell is up with that E8500 price? Newegg has it for $100 less, and I thought they weren’t even always the bottom barrel on CPU prices. That’s worth paying a 15% restocking fee. Just send it right back.
Anyway, the rest is fine (except I cringe at the retail price of Vista Ultimate), so don’t let anyone give you buyer’s remorse. People get enough of that on their own.
Yeah, if TigerDirect.com is anything like TigerDirect.ca, the prices are wildly high in some cases. My Core2Quad Q9550 was listed as $695 on TigerDirect.ca but only $391 on NCIX.ca. I’m not usually one to shop around, but that was insane. With the price matching which rei mentioned to try, it turned out NCIX couldn’t be beat.
The main reason to avoid tigerdirect isn’t their prices, it’s their horrible service. Their prices are highly variable, they can be competitive at times.
so can everyone start calling their canadian built-boxes rei-boxes now? :P
anyways, found yet ANOTHER sister company of ncix: compu2000. seems like that’s their mac-oriented storefront.
Buying from Tigerdirect is an instafail.
Good lord. You can build a wonderful games box for $1200 or so, and a decent one for $600.
NCIX is nice, but I still find local small independent stores in my area to be cheaper. But if there’s nothing around you, it’s great.
I used to try to stick to local shops, but their prices are too high in comparison. For a while I paid the higher prices just to support them, but then the premium went upwards of 25-50% and that was getting a little too much. But…I still check local before buying online. My favorite local shop has pretty incredible service and they know their stuff; too bad the prices aren’t competitive anymore.
It could just be area dependent. There are a tonne of little Asian-owned PC stores around with great prices. I guess the local competition keeps prices down. There’s also Canada Computers in a lot of areas here now, and while they usually have higher prices, they have incredible stock and inventory and generate a lot of business, which also drives prices down.
I’ve noticed that there’s been a lot of people advising to buy Dell and stick a decent video card into it yourself, but a couple of queries:
Only an enthusiast would bother to overclock, and no enthusiast would limit himself to a Dell. There’s just nothing to work with for upgrades and tweaks. It’s all proprietary.
Heck, I haven’t even bothered to overclock yet. Just spending my time enjoying it.
PSU question is a good one, though someone has to have thought of that. Can you even fit a mass-market PSU in there or is it a goofy size?
Unless you get a reallly low-end CPU, the PSU that ships with Dells is pretty solid. Not enough to do SLI or something (not that you could with the mobo you get) but certainly enough to run most recent cards. On Stusser’s advice I picked up a Dell Inspiron 530 earlier this year: Q6600, 500GB HDD, 4 Gigs DDR2/800 RAM for $500 on one of their sales. Then I threw a 9600GT in, but plenty of people have put 8800GT’s in as well and I’m sure the newer cards would be fine also. There are some cards that will push the power and the space, however.
As for overclocking, just be realistic about it. I built my previous two systems from scratch, with big plans to overclock or swap out the CPU later and in neither case did that happen. By the time you get two or three years down the road, the CPU series is likely out of production and whatever high speed processors hard to find. And how much does overclocking help, anyway? My last system was an Athlon 64 3200 with a 6800GT video card in it. Sure, I could have overclocked that thing, but it still wouldn’t have run Crysis all that much better.
And Dells aren’t nearly as proprietary as they used to be. Standard RAM slots, standard video card slots, standard connections. And for $500 I don’t expect it to last more than 3 years anyway, which about the rate I was building a new system.
Yeah, that’s a question that frequently pops into my mind as I weigh purchasing decisions. How much difference does it make for gaming purposes? Is it easy and convenient enough to merit the time and effort?
I have zero interest in overclocking just to boast about doing it. But if other people are getting significantly better results with the same hardware, I’d feel like a fool for not doing the same.
having went through my own enthusiast phase, a resounding NO. don’t waste your time damaging hardware and most importantly corrupting data.
I never have any hardware problems ever (knock on wood) but I wouldn’t bother unless half the fun to you is tweaking things. Not necessarily to boast, but just that type of personality, like a guy that enjoys working on his car.
Maybe keep an ear out for a hot CPU model that gets major overclocks without a peep, but those seem to only come by every few years.
Plus, I’ve noticed a lot of overclockers are people who buy cheaper stuff and OC it up to the performance standards at the time. So, as a way of saving money by buying cheaper hardware, it’s great. However, you don’t see many people who OC a few years in to make their stuff last longer.
I’m sure there are exceptions, though.
I’ll be getting a new PC sometime between now and Xmas. Is Dell seriously the way to go? What system would you get for around $1k? I guess I’ve still been under the erroneous assumption that it costs 1500 or more to get a good gaming PC. I don’t even need a monitor or keyboard (heh, so I’ll save $15 on that!).
I don’t know anything about Dell desktops. A quick look indicates that their base model with no monitor is about $600 with E8300 C2D, 4 GB RAM, no video card. An extra $200 for that and you’re good to go, maybe? Do the video cards fit in those Inspiron cases?
Might want to wait for a sale, that actually sounds expensive for a Dell.
All the way back in January, for $1150 (including tax and shipping) I got an XPS with 3GB RAM, Q6600, 8800GT, Blu Ray + DVD-R and 500GB HD.