Rsox4life said:
I have priced out a few of my own builds and got a little overwhelmed. It doesn't appear that I Will save that much. If you were buying a stock cpu or brand name desktop what would you guys look for or what would be the lowest specs you would go. I am not a gamer at all but do some picture and video of my daughters and want it to last a while. I would like to stay under 600. I have my own monitor already.
I'd want truly modern performance that you could live with for years that means the following requirements:
i5 Intel Quad CPU
8 Gig RAM (min)
SSD boot drive
decent size HD for backup and storage (1tb min)
Latest integrated Intel graphics or even better a real separate video card
CD/DVD burner
USB 3.0 ports available on front for convenience
Gigabit ethernet
It would be nice to have a case that has room for a bit of expandability also a 'standard mb' that has a normal amount of SATA III ports so you might add a HD.
Things you can expect from many low end prebuilt boxes:
Some will have the bare minimum of ports and sockets, exactly for what they include meaning you can't expand in ANY way. Low end Dell boxes are notorious for this.
Most prebuilt boxes will have very small power supplies (180 to 250 watts), when you assemble your own it's hard to find a supply smaller than 400 watts. This also severely restricts any upgrades.
So an example of a strategy:
Lenovo's Outlet has tons of good deals, all machines come with free shipping and a year warranty. On laptops one must be wary of 'scratch and dent' models as if the damage is to the screen, obviously we're talking serious compromise. On a desktop, who cares much about a scratch on a case that's going to sit under a desk ? They have a ton of identical IdeaCentre K450 boxes all scratch and dent priced at $405 to $459.
What do you get:
Latest i5-4430 Quad cpu (3.2 GHz)
8 Gig (2 x 4Gig) 1600 DDR 3 (mb has 4 slots, room to expand)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M real video card, substantially better than all Intel integrated graphics
1TB 7200 rpm HD
DVD/CD burner
Gigabit ethernet
Decent size real case, 2 USB 3 front ports
9 in 1 memory card reader
A 'standard mb' that has 4 SATA III ports to handle 4 drives and a case that has room to install them.
There is also a front port to directly plug in a USM portable hard drive, it's a standard that really hasn't taken off, pretty much only Seagate is making these, but it can just be ignored.
These are marketed as low end gaming boxes, which they are really not, but they fully meet our requirements except for the SSD boot drive, and since the mb and case can easily handle this, you simply add a decent 128 Gig SSD ($79 to $109) and you have everything needed for a box with excellent performance. When buying the SSD be aware all makes basically use 1 of 3 brands of controller: Sandforce, Marvel or Samsung. Rule 1: NO OCZ drives, they just went bankrupt because their quality control was beyond abysmal, Toshiba is buying the remains, ignore them atm. Sandforce controllers often appear the fastest but only because they use aggressive compression reading and writing. This works fine on compressible data like spreadsheets, text etc. On incompressible or already heavily compressed stuff this doesn't work (that includes most modern graphics jpg, png, almost all media audio or video, all zip rar and other compressed files and, most importantly pretty much all Programs and OS stuff.) We're going to use this drive to boot which means it's going to be filled with the OS and Programs, stuff that doesn't compress...Sandforce controllers won't help at all.
Marvel controllers don't play compression games, their thruput stays the same no matter what the data, they have also tended to be less buggy. Crucial, Plextor and others use Marvel controllers. Toshiba which has entered the market aggressively is using an 'evolved' version of a Marvel controller they jointly developed.
Samsung's controller is also quite stable and doesn't use compression, it's only used by Samsung currently.
I prefer Marvel or Samsung controllers for a boot drive.
So for $500 to $550 you should be able to mate one of these boxes to a good SSD and have an excellent 'midrange' box, you also won't outgrow easily.