Note: I am not a gamer. Anyone who recommends a $500 video card in this thread will be ignored
:):)
I love having a desktop computer. I like have plenty of screen real estate, i like that you can get plenty of power for less money than a laptop, and i have no real need for a laptop. My current computer, though, is coming up on six years old now, and it’s time to start thinking about a replacement.
I’ll tell you what i do with it, and what i’m thinking about, and if anyone has any advice i’d be most grateful.
First, my current setup:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 @ 2.5GHz
6Gb DDR2 RAM (2x2Gb, 2x1Gb)
Win 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
240Gb A-Data SSD + a few HDDs, internal and external
NVidia GeForce GT240 1Gb
1 x Dell 2208WFP 1680x1050
1 x Dell U2412M IPS 1920x1200
Much of my work involves fairly basic stuff, including email, internet, word processing, etc. To the extent that i need more power, it’s almost exclusively for image procesing (~20Mb RAW images from a 16Mp DSLR), and for video editing and encoding, generally using Adobe Premiere Elements and Handbrake. I am NOT a gamer, and don’t plan to start gaming.
The above setup has, for the most part, been perfectly fine for most of my work. I am, however, starting to notice its limitations in a few areas.
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Since i got the newer DSLR (old one was 6Mp), i notice that image editing in Lightroom and Photoshop is a little slower. In particular, the rendering of full-sized RAW images in Lightroom often takes a few seconds each time. Batch processing is also a bit slow. Not the end of the world, but a bit annoying.
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While video editing and encoding isn’t something i spend a huge amount of time on, i would like Premiere to run more smoothly, and the encoding process to go more quickly.
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When i’m doing word processing, and grading student work, i often use Dragon 12 voice recognition software to convert my voice to text. Dragon is a pretty resource-heavy program, and at times it runs slowly or freezes up and needs to be restarted, especially if i wait too long between saving my profile.
So, that’s where i am. I want a new desktop that will speed up what i do now and (hopefully) be sufficiently future-proof that i can keep the new one for over five years like i did with this one.
I have a few key decisions to make here: build versus buy; Windows 7 versus Windows 10; and CPU type.
I’ve never built my own system before. I’ve changed out RAM, hard drives, and video card, but never done the whole thing from scratch. I’m happy to give it a go, and to spend some time on it, as long as there’s some sort of upside. I’ve been very happy with Windows 7, but there have been good reviews of Windows 10 too. And it’s still not clear to me how high on the processor tree i need to go.
So, any advice welcome. To get things rolling, here’s a possible system that i put together on PCPartPicker, and a system that i can currently get from HP (my current computer is an HP, and and i’ve been very happy with it).
$328 Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor
$97 Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
$77 Kingston HyperX Fury Black 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory
$98 Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
$60 Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case
$90 EVGA SuperNOVA G2 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply
$750 Total (without OS, plus tax)
That could actually get down to about $700 if i manage to get all discounts and rebates currently listed for those parts, but i refuse to count on rebates when pricing equipment.
As you can see, there’s no video card listed there, but i could probably put the GT 250 from my current computer in, or even rely on the on-board video, considering that i don’t game. I can scavenge the DVD drive from my current box for the build.
By contrast, here’s a machine i can currently get off the HP website:
Intel(R) Core™ i7-6700 processor quad-core [3.4GHz, 8MB Shared Cache]
16GB DDR4-2133 DIMM (2x8GB) RAM
4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 745 [DVI, HDMI, DP, DVI to VGA adapter]
500W Power supply
256GB SATA 2.5 TLC Solid State Drive
Windows 7 Professional 64 (or Windows 10 home)
Integrated Sound, Bang & Olufsen Audio
SuperMulti DVD Burner
$783 (plus tax)
As you can see, there’s nominally more bang for the buck. For about the same price, i get an operating system thrown in, and i also get the latest generation Skylake processor, a low-end video card, and an optical drive. Same amount of memory, same size SSD.
In looking into the build-it-myself option, my main reason for going with an i7 processor is future-proofing. I’ve looked at benchmarks for the stuff i do most often, like image processing and video encoding, and most of the number i’ve seen suggest that i could drop down to an i5-4690 processor without losing very much speed at all, and save almost $100.
So, that’s the sort of stuff i’m tossing around right now. Any advice would be most welcome.