Thread: How many $$ for a new PC?

Ridiculous prices!

Nearly every PC I see advertised is for gaming. I don't do games.

I don't have a single game on mine (dunno if Win 10 has Solitaire or Minesweeper).

i just built one for a guy who supplied all the bits he imported himself

6.5k worth of bits he reckons

i think all the lights in godwin beach dimmed when i turned it on for the first time..

he was doing the software install, i just had to build and optimise

madness....

gaming computers are more expensive and hence greater profit.

i think gaming drives the innovation .....

And no matter what I spend, I still can't win.
Same as people who spend mega bucks on stereos or cars, still the same basic function.
But if it rocks their boat,

Trouble with buying brand eg dell or hp, is your locked into proprietary hardware

im playing fallout 4 at 4k.
a low end graphics card just wont cut it.

If you have some idea as to what you need and don`t mind buying used, you can set up a reasonable computer at a decent price. Have seen what I want but out my price range. My computer has cost me about $700 to set up. You could more than double that if you where to buy every thing new. Nothing over two years old has been brought. Not a new fancy case, just a old Xenon server case. I like to play a modded Sky rim and it handles that with no problems.

Trouble with buying brand eg dell or hp, is your locked into proprietary hardware

And also a stack of pre installed software that you don`t need and will be exceedingly difficult to remove. We had a HP years ago that came with Mcafee antivirus. Did the normal remove program. Got the blue screen of death. Was after dealing with that computer I learn t enough to put them together my self.
Cheers Hall

I have always maintained that you can stay closer to the bleeding edge for less money if you buy a level or two below top of the range or if you buy last year's model.

My argument is that if you spend top dollar for the latest and greatest, it might be three or four years before you can afford to update or before you can persuade the Minister for Finance that you need to upgrade. So you have spent a lot of money and towards the end, you were using a computer that was about four years out of date.

If you bought a two year old machine, it would probably cost one quarter the price of a new one, so you could probably afford to upgrade to another cheap two year old machine in a year or two. Even if you had to wait two years to upgrade, you would still only be using a four year old machine. In other words by buying down the price or age range a bit, you still never had an older machine than if you had spent up big on brand new.

Since I don't play games, I can take that philosophy even further. Each of my last three computers cost $0 because someone was getting rid of them so they could run the latest version of Windows. I just install Linux and get quite satisfactory performance doing the sort of tasks that the vast majority of users do.

As I haven't invested a small fortune in the computer, I can quite readily discard it and upgrade when someone else decides that a four or five year old computer isn't good enough for them.

Of course if you want to play games, that approach probably isn't an option. If you only need the computer to do productive work, it is quite a cost effective approach.