Help Choosing a Pre-built Gaming PC Please

Hah, yep. I have a 2012-ish Korean 27" 1440p monitor that only supports DVI, so it would have to be pretty dang old.

Speaking of the relentless passage of time, I was surprised to see, when going through @Dan_Theman 's CyberpowerPC link above, that they didn’t offer an optical drive at all. I could get a BD-ROM separately, I think, but how am I supposed to use the rest of my twenty-year-old spindle of blank CDs? These 3.5" disks lying around are just gonna have to keep languishing too.

Yeah, the alieware I bought, the case is actually slightly bigger than my older mid-size case, but it’s shaped so that it can never have an internal DVD writing drive or 3.5 inch floppy drive.

I’m scratching my head, wondering how I’m going to keep making CDs for my wife that she can listen to in her car.

LOL, I picture your name as DISCman so perfect subject. They are fun the throw like freesbies.

My new PC was the first one Ive owned without some sort of disc or floppy drive as well. I don’t even have an option of installing one. Case wont allow it, its a solid front. Strange times indeed.

These days you can just hook up one of these with USB…

Yeah I got a little USB DVD drive for $18 like 7 years ago. Have only used it for turbotax, which is often cheaper on physical disk.

Likewise. I’ve actually been looking at external drives as I occasionally like to watch rented movies, particularly the stinkers, on my PC while playing something simple like ATS, and on the off chance I ever buy another physical movie I’d like to be able to add it to my Plex server. I looked at enclosures for my old internal Blu-Ray drive but they’re almost as expensive as external drives.

Do you put it on top of your case? For the alienware, that’s not even an option. Looks like they purposely made the top of the case curved so that you can’t put anything on top of it.

No, I leave it in my closet way on top of the shelving units. I’ve only used it like twice.

If you need it more frequently I guess you could use velcro tape or something.

That’s a great point actually. The only time I used the drive on my previous computer that I bought in 2009 was when I burnt those music CDs for the car. So at most once a month at its peak. You’re right, the rest of the time, since it’s external usb, it can just sit on a shelf somewhere. That didn’t occur to me. One of the advantages of being external! You only need to connect it when you want to use it, which is rare anyway. Might as well put it on the floor while it’s burning those CDs.

Right, there’s a reason why computers don’t come with DVD drives anymore. I haven’t had a 5.25" DVD drive in my desktop for 10 years. Modern desktop chassis often don’t have 5.25" mounts anymore, they just put a 140mm fan mount there.

When I built my previous computer (2015 or 2016) I included an optical drive but in truth I never used it. Not a single time. For all I know it’s defective and doesn’t even work. :) The new computer I purchased last year didn’t come with an optical drive and I can see why not. If I ever needed one in a pinch there’s always the USB route as mentioned above.

My 1070 has a dual DVI port on it (in the old pc that is now my daughter’s), but my 3070 does not.

So it’s not quite as much of a dinosaur as you’d think, but it’s a good thing imo that they seem to have moved on from it.

Interesting, especially the dual port! I didn’t know outputs differed so much from cards in the same generation.

Does your wife’s car not have a USB slot that can read MP3s off a USB stick? Or is does she just prefer using CDs?

I hooked up my phone into the USB slot in the car once. It didn’t seem to do anything. The stereo, when I turned it to USB, didn’t seem to have any kind of interface for actually browsing anything. Maybe I was doing something wrong, I’m not sure, but I didn’t find any way of actually playing music using USB.

Meanwhile, the CD drive’s interface is nice. Instead of browsing folders and subfolders and such, it’s like a normal CD player interface, where you just play, or skip a track, and it just goes through all the folders and subfolders I make on the CD in order.

Did you try just playing something on your phone? It might just be taking an audio feed from the phone

Look at the ad copy on these 4th Gen 4 (Haswell) or older (one of the systems is Sandy Bridge) Intel systems:

“Right now, Dell is opening up the vaults and selling scores of their Optiplex series models, each fully refurbished, certified, and Microsoft-authorized to perform like a brand spanking new, off the shelves product. And for the gamers, each has been upgraded to feature an Nvidia GeForce GT 1030 graphics card.”

This timeline still blows.

There are also a number of Optiplex with Coffee Lake or later showing up on ebay, if you’re into that sort of bargain hunting.

e.g. I just bought a SFF i5-9500 w. 8G and small SSD for under $300; should make a nice little server box I guess.