Help with new PC
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Spec looks reasonable. Not sure on the competativeness of the price, since I don't know $CAN rates. It's off the shelf, which you want, so, I'd look in more detail at this.
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Sorry for the post necromancy, and this probably won't do Mat. much good, but I just had my computer melt down at the motherboard level over the weekend so I got to go build a new system for myself and thought I'd throw out my experiences of spending 8 hours at Dell, Frys, Costco, etc. in case anyone else is looking.
Most the off the shelf units I found in store had underpowered graphics cards (best I found was a GF620 or Radeon HD 7570, neither of which won't do Direct X 11 in full 1080 if I read things right, -maybe- the 7570 can). On top of that everything came with a 300watt power supply which meant buying a lower end system and putting better parts in it probably wouldn't be a great idea since you wouldn't have the power needed. By the time I settled in on a system at Frys, picked a new power supply and video card I realized I was paying a lot of money to have to tinker with this thing to make it work for my purposes. (The did have a babyAlienware for $1000, but even it had a sub-par graphics card in it and needed a $150 investment to make it work well).
Off the shelf here in the US I can get a i7 Intel, 2TB HD, 8GB Ram, with the r7570 or GF620 in it with a 24" LCD for $1200 at Frys, Costco or online at Dell (around $1K without monitor).
I went over to Cyberpowerpc.com and checked out what I could pay them to build.
I got:
CAS: Corsair Carbide 300R Mid-Tower Gaming Case w/ front USB 3.0
CD: 24X Double Layer Dual Format DVD+-R/+-RW + CD-R/RW Drive (BLACK COLOR)
CPU: Intel(R) Core™ i7-3770 3.40 GHz 8MB Intel Smart Cache LGA1155 [-40]
FAN: Asetek 510LC Liquid Cooling System 120MM Radiator & Fan (Enhanced Cooling Performance + Extreme Silent at 20dBA) (Single Standard 120MM Fan)
FREEBIE_MB: GIGABYTE GC-WB300D Exclusive Bluetooth 4.0/WiFi PCIe Expansion Card [+0]
HDD: 2TB (2TBx1) SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 64MB Cache 7200RPM HDD (Single Drive)
MEMORY: 8GB (4GBx2) DDR3/1866MHz Dual Channel Memory [+9] (Corsair or Major Brand)
MONITOR: 24" Widescreen 1920x1080 ASUS VS247H-P LCD [+157]
POWERSUPPLY: 700 Watts - Standard Power Supply - SLI/CrossFireX Ready
VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 2GB 16X PCIe 3.0 Video Card [+40] (Major Brand Powered by NVIDIA)For $1245. (I wish I had spent another $100 and improved a couple things but meh- double the machine I have now anyway.)
I wanted the i7 because I use Photoshop a lot and often have 7 or 8 files open at a time with 1200+ layers in each which makes some computers cry.
If you want to build something to game and surf the Internet and aren't doing massive photo or video editing then you can get the high end i5 processor with a better graphics card and have a better gaming machine in the end (move up to a GF660 at least). If you don't need a monitor then you can come in at around $1000 US.
Unfortunately they charge to ship to Canada (US it's free).
I'm not a professional computer-making-guy and probably should have made a couple of changes.