I haven’t bought a prebuilt desktop since the 1990s, so I never realized that the mainstream manufacturers don’t deal much in more-than-four-core PCs.
Friend of mine wants a system for both VR gaming and video editing. So he’d definitely benefit from an i7-6800K or 6900K system. (I have a 3960X and nobody’s going to argue that 6 or 8 cores isn’t a huge benefit when doing a lot of video rendering. : )
Smaller mail-order places like Cyberpower or iBuyPower make them, but I was never that impressed with their stuff when I used to do hardware reviews. And places like Puget charge a crazy big markup vs. what it would cost to build your own.
Any suggestions? I could easily build him a system, but life’s pretty busy right now, and then I become tech support. :)
I don’t deny the possibility someone’s gonna waltz in with the perfect answer, but I think you may be glimpsing the options before you: there’s some low-end crappy guys selling dubious systems, and some very high end folks selling works of art. … but there doesn’t feel like there’s a highly configurable, do-whatever-you-want middle ground these days.
Okay, I’ll tread on my own supposition:
Dell’s Alienware line does sell 6±core PCs. . . in the top-of-the-line Area 51 variant this is utterly ghastly to look at (and still pretty badly overpriced compared to building it yourself unless you catch a hot deal or good coupon.
Probably better to buy a SuperMicro Xeon server motherboard at that point and build yourself. Servers are all about 10 plus cores. Desktops not as much. Last I checked the 10+ core chips are like 1500 each; 6 and 8 core isn’t too bad though.
A phone call to Dell on their XPS desktops might work, but the value is poor, probably $400 more than a comparable self-built system and still without an SSD.
Basically consumers aren’t buying these anymore. Mainly for a good reason as the horsepower isn’t very useful to most users. So for those few left that aren’t willing to build their own (mostly IT departments buying for their minority power users) they charge a lot.
Honestly what’s most shocking to me about the Alienware case is how massive it is. When I saw pictures of the design it looked hideous enough. But then I saw it in person at PAX and holy shit it’s huge too.
