Need a new desktop computer. Looking for advice (buy/build; hardware; etc.).

Note: I am not a gamer. Anyone who recommends a $500 video card in this thread will be ignored
:):):slight_smile:

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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).

PCPartPicker



$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.

I would guess that a sizeable chunk of that HP’s $783 price tag is due to the Bang & Olufson name. That said, $600-700 is about what you’re going to pay for a desktop with a discrete gpu and an i7.

I would say you definitely want an SSD card, for your OS and image editing purposes. OTOH, I have an i5 and I’m happy with it. Happy enough that I keep talking about upgrading to an i7 and never getting around to it.

I just went and looked at Dell’s Labor Day deals. Thoroughly uninspiring.

The margins are so thin, any more, that there’s really not a whole lot of savings to be had by building your own.

Right, there’s not really any financial savings. For comparable specs, it’s generally cheaper to go with the pre-built system.

But there’s the thing: the “comparable specs” part often doesn’t take into account the quality of the components. For the processor, it’s unlikely to be a factor, because an i7-4790 processor is the same thing whether i put it in, or HP does.

But if i build a computer myself i can make sure that i put a reliable power supply, decent RAM, a well-reviewed motherboard, and a good CPU heatsink in there, whereas you never quite know what you’re getting from companies like Dell and HP.

That’s part of my question, i guess: is spending a few bucks more, and making the effort to build my own system, actually worth it in terms of quality and upgradeability, or is it just as well to go for the pre-built box?

And i agree with you about Dell’s Labor Day deals. They actually seemed pretty damn expensive to me.

Build/buy:
As you’ve discovered, pre-built systems from companies like HP and Dell can be price-competitive with (or lower-priced than) systems you build yourself.

And you don’t have to worry about what happens if you turn your system on after you finish assembling it and nothing happens. Unless you do this often enough that you have a spare power supply / memory / CPU, you will likely be be in for an unpleasant time if the system doesn’t power up properly the first time.

What you give up with the pre-built systems is expandability. I’m most familiar with Dell, but a lot of this applies to all of the big brands. The motherboard, power supply and case are designed to work together and have various non-standard connectors (a common one is the front panel power switch / USB / audio connectors) which make swapping the motherboard impractical. CPU fans / heatsinks are often custom and may not accommodate the more powerful processors in a series. Dell has climbed onto the 12V-only power supply bandwagon and for some systems (like the Optiplex 9020) there are no aftermarket power supplies, period. Dell gets the complete case / motherboard / power supply from a supplier like Foxconn and then adds the processor / heatsink / memory / drive(s). So even Dell doesn’t have to deal with integrating the case, motherboard and power supply - their vendor does all of that.

Windows 7 vs. 10:
If you purchase a system with Windows 7, you should be able to take advantage of the “free upgrade” that Microsoft offers to entice people to use Windows 10. As you’re using 7 now, you know that all the programs you already use will work properly. Once you’ve settled in with your new system, you can try the upgrade to 10 (after making a backup of your system in case you decide to go back to 7).

CPU:
Since you say you’ve changed components before, I’d suggest getting a processor that is in the lower end of a relatively recent processor family. Later on, if you need more “oomph” you can swap out the CPU. By that time, prices will have come down, or if the processor family has been superseded, you can get a used CPU on eBay. The only thing to watch out for is built-in options on the processor. For example, on the earliest Core i3/i5/i7, you could upgrade between those models, but the i7’s didn’t have integrated video so you needed an add-on video card if you upgraded. Also, be sure to update the BIOS to the latest before swapping the CPU - if the new CPU came out after the existing BIOS, it may not be recognized and you’d have to swap the CPUs again to update the BIOS.

How soon do you want to replace? The new Intel Skylake chip just came out and systems running it should be here anytime. Once it shows up in PCs, expect all previous CPU prices to drop. Or wait a bit and get a new computer with the Skylake chip and be set for quite a while.

Part of the point of a desktop is that you can upgrade parts without buying a whole new system, so if I were you I’d just upgrade the CPU (to a quad-core i5) and motherboard, and leave the rest alone. Your SSD, OS, case, and power supply should still work just fine.

Last time I looked into this (earlier this year), Adobe software could not take advantage of additional computing power very effectively. You should double-check my research, but here’s what I found out back then:

If your primary focus is Adobe, last I checked the benchmarks (a few months ago), the programs are just not very well optimized for multicore, GPGPU, or hardware-accelerated video encoding. They “work”, technically, but usually the performance gain is surprisingly only like 10-15% instead of the several hundred percent you’d expect. Thanks, Adobe :frowning: The programs are old and seem to be written primarily for fast, single-threaded CPUs, with only very limited ability to take advantage of parallelization. That’s Adobe’s dirty little secret that they don’t tell you when they advertise the Mercury Engine.

Lightroom, for instance, isn’t much faster even on a RAMdisk (which is hundreds of times faster than a fast SSD), and beyond 4 cores, there are very rapidly diminishing returns in benchmarks. Basically the software just isn’t great at harnessing today’s computer power beyond raw CPU speed.

Also, the Core-series processors come with a dedicated sub-processor used exclusively for video encoding (“Intel QuickSync”), and in applications that support it, this is typically even faster than many dedicated graphics cards. There are some third-party plugins that sort of make it work with Adobe Media Encoder, but in my experience it was completely hit and miss… but if you’re lucky enough to get that working, and are ok with its limited profiles (usually only h264 on certain profiles) it will be much faster than any other hardware upgrade.

Thanks for the reply Terry.

I assume, from your post, that you’d probably recommend building it myself, but with a lower-end processor? Is that right?

Duckster, i’d like to do it soonish, but i’m not in a massive rush. The HP that i specced in my OP actually has the Skylake processor and DDR4 memory. If i order that system, it will not ship until about October 2, according to the HP website.

As far as upgrading the CPU goes, it seems that if i go for an i5-4690 or i7-4790 now, i won’t be able to upgrade to the Skylake processor later on (unless i also switch out the motherboard), because the new processor is Socket 1151 rather than 1150, and from what i’ve read the Skylake isn’t backwards compatible. I could be wrong about that though; i’m not an expert on all this processor architecture stuff.

I’m sure you’re right that once the Skylake really gets going, the older processors will come down in price. It will then, i guess, be a question of whether to save some money and hope and older processor will be fine in 5 years, or get the new one and be guaranteed that things will be fine.

From what i’ve been reading, though, it seems that the current generation (pre-Skylake) processors are powerful enough that, unless my needs change dramatically, they should be good for at least a few years.

Reply, your comments about Adobe stuff, though a little more technical than i’m used to, seems to confirm what i’ve been reading. CPUs that seems, from benchmark tests, to be much more powerful don’t actually run Adobe software much faster at all. For example, on CPUBenchmark.com, the i5-4690 has a Passmark score of about 7,600, and the i7-4790 is about 10,000, but on benchmark tests for Photoshop, the i7 is only about 5-8% faster.

Your suggestion of just swapping out the mobo and CPU seems, on its face, perfectly reasonable, but there are a few things that might complicate doing it that way.

First, i’ve actually been having a few small problems with my current (HP) case, in particular the power button, Sometimes, it won’t activate at all. I’m sure it’s just a loose connection somewhere, and i could probably find and fix it if i were willing to really look for it, but at the moment i’m just leaving the computer on all the time because i can’t risk not having it start up.

Also, i was under the impression that it is often hard to swap out motherboards in cases like Dell and HP. I’ve read that the cases sometimes have the motherboard mount in non-standard positions. Is that not the case? It’s also very cramped in there, and some of HP’s stuff like the HDD cages are a real pain to get out. The case i selected in my self-build was chosen because it has lots of room, and is recommended as a good case for novice builders.

I was also under the impression that swapping out the mobo and CPU on an OEM Windows box could leave you without a valid license for the OS. Is that not the case?

The fans on the old box are getting noisy (even after a cleaning), the card reader no longer recognizes my SD cards, i’d like a case than can take more than one extra HDD (reduce the number of external drives on my desk), and i’d also like USB 3.0.

Finally, another reason for building a new box from scratch is that i would not be risking any down-time for my computer. This is a fairly important issue, because the semester has started and if i screw something up and am without the computer for a few days, it could put me well behind on my work. If i do a new build, i can keep the current computer running, both for work, and for troubleshooting.

And, if i’m being honest, i’d also just like a new computer! :slight_smile:

Before spending lots of money, open Task Manager and see how much RAM and CPU are being used. If your CPU is hitting 100% then you need a faster CPU; if your RAM usage is more than 6 GB, then you need more RAM. If the latter you need to check how much RAM your motherboard can take: an upgrade to 8 GB won’t do much but an upgrade to 16 GB will. And upgrading the RAM will be far cheaper than replacing the whole lot.

With regards to graphics cards, you might like to investigate the professional graphics cards (AMD FirePro, Nvidia Quadro) and see if they might help.

Don’t buy an i7-4790 without the equipment to overclock it. (generally just a quality power supply, motherboard, and a better than stock cooler such as thisor this. )

The extra $70-$100 means another 20% or more performance.

Also, don’t buy an Intel CPU right before it is about to be phased out. Get this one instead. That’s like buying an iphone 6 plus today instead of waiting 2 days for the upgraded phone at the same price.

An overclocked i5 (i5 + one of the coolers I linked) is the same cost as a stock cooler i7, but gives you substantially more performance on anything you actually do with a computer. The reason is that afundamental theory of computer science essentially means in practice that virtually all software does better with a smaller number of faster cores than a larger number of slower cores. All hyperthreading does is give you fake “pseudo-cores” that kind of act as if you have more cores than the chip actually ships with. This does help sometimes but if you are only going to spend ~$700, it’s a better deal to overclock.

You do need a CPU upgrade, those old Core 2 Quads are very slow compared to the i7 and subsequent chips.

Oh, and if you take my advice and go with an i5-2600k as the base, the DDR-4 RAM is onlyslightly more expensive. You want a quality motherboard like this one.

As you can see, the newest stuff does cost a little more. An extra 40 bucks for the mainboard, an extra $30 bucks for the ram. Definitely worth it, though - skylake is faster per core, has a faster integrated GPU, and uses less power. You don’t have to wait, either, you could have this rig up and running by Thursday or Friday this week.

An older processor should be fine in five years, assuming “older” means a higher end current generation processor. I’m still running an i7 860 (albeit overclocked) and it works fine, including gaming. And that thing came out in 2009.

Quartz, i have a Rainmeter system resources widget on my desktop, which i keep an eye on. I sometimes max out my RAM when i’m multitasking, especially when editing images, to the extent that i occasionally get a message from the OS telling me to shut programs. Admittedly, though, the warning generally only happens when i’ve left a lot of stuff open, including Firefox with a couple of dozen tabs.

The CPU always maxes out when i’m encoding video, although i was under the impression that this is normal and expected. If i understand it correctly, just about any CPU will max out when encoding, because encoding is a CPU-intensive task; the main difference is that a faster CPU will get the job done more quickly. Is my understanding correct there?

More memory in my current system is sort of pointless. It can’t take more than 8GB, so to get that i’d have to take out two of the 1GB modules, and replace them with 2GB modules, and because it’s older DDR2 it’s not only slower, but actually considerably more expensive (on a $$$ per GB basis) than newer, faster memory.

Habeed, i quite like your suggestions, because it gives me the newer Skylake processor, and dropping back down to the i5 version saves me about $80 over the i7-4790 Haswell, which i could then put towards some DDR4memory and a better motherboard.

Speaking of motherboards, it’s probably the area where i’m least knowledgeable. What advantage does the board you recommended give me over the cheaper version. When i compare them, i can see some of the differences, but it’s not clear to me whether those differences are important for the build i want. The more expensive one has a PCIEX8 slot that the other one doesn’t have, and it supports SLI and Crossfire, neither of which i’m going to need as a non-gamer. The more expensive board has a water-cooling fan header, but while i would buy an aftermarket heatsink (i have to with the Skylake processor anyway, because they don’t ship with one), i don’t think i’d bother with water cooling.

Jophiel, from what i’ve read, you’re absolutely right. If i got an i5-4690 or i7-4790 now, i’m sure it would easily be powerful enough for a good long life. Having looked into Habeed’s suggestions, however, it seems i could get the latest generation for very little extra money, and maybe leave myself a more open upgrade path later on.

Thanks for all the suggestions folks. I seem to be leaning towards building it myself, partly because i think that would be cool!

Mhendo : the cheaper version is micro ATX, not ATX. Selecting by ATX was one of the first narrow down things I did. ATX boards are bigger and they are easier to work around if you have several graphics cards.

So, the differences : micro ATX, so smaller board, possibly more cramped components and poorer heat dissipation (my other concern), possibly not. ALC892 instead of ALC1150, which might mean worse sound (I say might because the quality of mainboard sound has always been mediocre and it’s not the quality of the DAC, it’s the quality of the amplifier components that matters). Only 1 PCIe slot appropriate for a graphics card, which would make it harder to game on the fancy new VR headsets…which you don’t plan to do anyway…so, fine. Save the money.

Building it yourself is super easy and at this point, you get warranties comparable to what HP would give you on individual components. The one tricky bit about build it yourself is that if you ever do have problems, you want a second computer of similar vintage around to test with. Meaning, you want to be a multiple computer household or to have some nearby friends who also build machines themselves. Getting parts replaced is relatively easy, you just RMA/advance RMA them or buy from ebay once the warranties expire in 3-5 years, but you need a second computer so that you can do test swaps to find out for certain what the problem actually is. Test swapping is the most certain way to isolate problems and is in many cases superior to voltmeters and other basic electronic testing techniques.

Ah, i completely missed that the two boards are different form factors. Thanks.

As for the testing thing, that might be an issue. The only other computers in our house are my old desktop and my wife’s Macbook Air. I don’t think i know anyone who builds their own either. I have a friends who’s a network admin at a local high school, but all their desktops come assembled, and he’s mainly into the networking stuff anyway, not PC building.

Might be a case of crossing my fingers and hoping that everything works. :slight_smile:

Usually it will, and usually you can just tell what the problem is directly. Most common 2 problems are power supply failure and mechanical hard drive failure (and this is true for any computer no matter who made it). Usually, if the power supply fails, it just won’t power up, and if the hard drive fails, either you will get error messages when you try to boot or windows will just freeze and stop responding and then it won’t reboot.

Thanks.

I’ve got working hard drives all over the place here, so that’s at least one area where i could, if i suspected a drive problem, swap it out and try one i know to be functional. I assume i could also pop the new SSD into an external dock before the build, and run a test on it using my current computer to make sure that it’s working.

If the way you’re using it is maxxing the RAM then you need more RAM. The computer is a tool for you to use, not a tool that gets in your way.

Yes, you are correct about encoding, but I was really thinking about activities other than encoding. Sorry, I should have specified.

Yes, you’re again correct.

How important is encoding to you, and what is your budget? Because you can get CPUs with many more cores than the 4790: look at the Xeon processors, but they cost. And they can cost a LOT.

If you’re satisfied with the features of a pre-assembled system and don’t plan on installing any add-on cards or more drives, then the pre-assembled system should be fine. Make sure that the system is orderable with at least 16GB of RAM. It doesn’t matter if you only order it with 8GB - this just ensures that when you want to add memory, that it is possible. Note that you may have to remove existing memory to do that - if you order a system with 8GB, it is likely to come with 4 x 2GB modules, not 2 x 4GB.

By lower-end processor I mean one at the less-expensive end of a current model series, not something from a previous generation. There’s some point in the processor family lineup where the price difference between processor models starts increasing rapidly. Buying the last processor before the first big increase is generally the “sweet spot”.

To answer some other questions that came up:

Replacing the motherboard in a system with a SLIC-based OEM license for Windows will definitely flag the Windows installation as “not genuine”. However, your system should have a Windows Certificate of Authenticity somewhere on the case with a license key that should work for a re-installation. And if it doesn’t, call Microsoft’s activation support and they can issue a replacement. Most non-Microsoft software allows deactivation so it can be reinstalled on another system. Just make sure you have the serial number / activation key / whatever so you can do that.

As I mentioned, most of the big system manufacturers are using custom cases and motherboards, which makes swapping difficult. And it sounds like there’s enough issues with your existing system that I’d start from scratch, with either an assembled system or one you build yourself.

OK, i think i’ve narrowed it down to two now:

Pre-assembled: HP Envy 750SE

Intel Core i7-6700 processor quad-core 3.4GHz
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

~$850 including tax and shipping
Self-build:

Intel Core i5-6600K 3.5 GHz Quad-Core
G.SKILL Ripjaws 4 series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 RAM
Gigabyte - GA-Z170XP-SLI ATX Motherboard
Noctua NH-D14 120mm & 140mm SSO CPU Cooler
EVGA 220-G2-0550-Y1 80 PLUS GOLD 550 W PSU
Corsair Carbide Series 200R ATX Mid Tower Case
Samsung -250GB 850 Evo 2.5" SATA III SSD
Onboard video, or use old GeForce GT240 from current computer
Windows (still deciding on version, but costs are about the same)

~$960 including tax and shipping

As i said, i find the idea of putting one together myself quite appealing, but am i crazy to do that? The HP is over $100 cheaper, and most of the specs are the same, except that it has a faster processor (new Skylake version), and also comes with a discrete video card.

The advantages of the self-build seem to be:

[ol]
[li]Easier to upgrade.[/li][li]Possibly higher-quality individual components (especially motherboard, PSU, heatsink).[/li][li]While the processor is lower-end than the HP, it is an unlocked processor, which could be overclocked without too much trouble.[/li][li]Time - as someone noted upthread, i could have the self-build by this weekend, whereas the HP won’t ship for over three weeks.[/li][li]The satisfaction of building (??? :))[/li][/ol]

It’s just not clear to me whether or not these benefits offset the price difference. Opinions?

Edit: Terry, as you can see, the HP comes with 2x8GB RAM. There is also an option on the website for 4X8GB, so i assume that the HP motherboard has 4 slots, and that i could add more memory myself later if necessary.