Over the years I believe Stusser has made two prior recommendations for me (a Dell and a Maingear), and I’ve been happy as a clam with both, but happiest with my current Maingear rig (a Vybe).
Now I implore thee Oh Stusser for another recommendation. I’m really not sure what happened yet this weekend but my Vybe may have given up the ghost. My “guy” (friend who’s a gamer and has his own company installing and maintaining PCs for us unwashed ignorants) is coming by this afternoon to diagnose it.
I won’t say money is no object but from past experience you are cost conscious and get as much bang for the buck as possible. Let’s say around $1500 give or take. I am partial to Nvidia cards as I’ve had some trouble with AMD in the past. And I’d like 512g SSD (current 256g has been limiting).
I can’t say I could tell the differences in their models other than they go lo to hi end Vybe, R1, F131, Rush. I’ve been happy with my Vybe and had zero problems until now.
Thank you for helping keep a gaming brother in action over the years! Luckily I am playing AC Odyssey on PS4 which will keep me busy in the interim.
If you don’t want to build your own, I would check out NZXT’s BLD, they offer really great prices, very close to what you could do building your own. This config is $1500 and would do great at 1440p gaming.
The maingear $1500 Vybe option uses a 2060 non-super which is a much, much slower GPU. The RTX2060 is essentially a GTX1070 while the RTX2070S is basically a GTX1080ti. Big difference there.
Never heard of that ASRock as a motherboard brand. I take it they are good and reliable? I’ve been lucky that my PC from 2009 is still working, and part of that is thanks to my Gigabyte motherboard being rock solid all these years. ASRock is in the same reliability zone?
However, the allure of a new gaming machine is there, plus I’m really not sure how long ago it was that you recommended the Maingear (hard to believe but it has to be 3 and maybe 4 years ago, time flies!). I never upgraded from windows 8.1 so that needs to happen too.
It’s not like I’m holding the SSD failure against Maingear, but in the end, you have delivered on the more bang for your buck once again, and this appears to be a good upgrade that will hold up for a number of years.
If the only problem is the SSD, I would replace it regardless as it’s wasteful to throw out an otherwise functional machine. Give it to your nephew or aunt or something. I recently bought a 500GB SSD for $50 for my HTPC, they’re incredibly cheap now.
I’d do the same… Replace your SSD, which is easy and a good time to do a fresh Win 10 install. Then if you want new stuff, do the usual easy GPU upgrade to a 2060S or whatever and you’re probably good til the next console generation at the end of 2020, when you can reassess if you choose to.
In my opinion a decent gaming PC purchased today will be hardware competitive with the PS5 and XBox 7000 or whatever. Consoles are well optimized and powerful on release, but they’re not above that NZXT $1,500 PC powerful either.
Plus, AMD’s 5700 release has pushed down graphics card prices from where they were in January. Finally, lower cost consumer-grade NVME hard drives are out, such as that intel 660p. Ram is reasonable.
Prices didn’t drop so much as you get more for your money with the Super rebrands. GPUs are still extremely expensive compared to only a couple years ago due to Nvidia greed.
All good thoughts. I will get it repaired and then upgrade my wife’s PC upstairs, it’s a really low end Dell and is at least six years old at this point.
I think you used to a cheaper version recommendation as well, where you find a decent Dell PC (or other company) without a video card, and then put a new video card in there. I can’t remember if you used to have a power supply upgrade as part of that recommendation or not.
These days pretty much every real gaming GPU needs external power and dells typically can’t take an aftermarket power supply, so I doubt that’s a good recommendation now.
If you really want to go cheap you can build a great 1080p gaming PC for like $700. Buy the windows license from Kinguin for $30.
