[Geckorian]

building you own computer is so plug and play now a days that it might be cheaper to just order parts from newegg and use youtube vids to put it together. My wife has done this with our last 3 computers in the house. This also gives you the option of picking your own parts so you can get what you need instead of buying off the rack as it were.

[badfart1000]

I would suggest building your own PC and here are some parts I would recommend:
Nvidia  GTX 1070 graphics card
Intel 4790k processer (not latest gen but works fantastic)
16gb of ddr3 1866 mhz memory (ddr4 is pricey for not much more, and you shouldn't need more than 16gb)
I use the MSI Gaming 5 motherboard and it works great for me, but you need to make sure the motherboard is compatible with the processor.
As for cooling, if you get a coolermaster storm trooper/stryker (I have the trooper) it has plenty of case fans, so you shouldn't need to get any more than that.

If you don't want to build a computer and have a large budget I'd say go for Origin PC

Rowebot has a good suggestion on getting a workstation, but they aren't optomized for gaming, and so if you are looking to get very high end stuff workstations aren't the way to go.

[Rowebot]

If you want to do high end gaming, the Dell T3500/T5500/T7500 are not the way to go. Only one graphics card power plug with too little power for the piggier GPU cards. And the specs say 16x PCI-E compatible connector but only 8x PCI-E electrical signals and speed. Good for mid level gaming using graphics cards that suck only some of the power from a single connector (60 watts comes to mind but I don't know if that is the right number) -- high end cards want 2 power plugs and draw 150 to 200 watts or more.

Doesn't matter to me because a mid-level GPU card is good enough for work. I prefer to use the Quadro cards+firmware+drivers which get OpenGL rendering 100% right. The same silicon GFX cards+firmware+drivers get OpenGL/DirectX fast for games but take rendering short cuts which are not 100% right.

---

Many games are still hobbled by the speed of a single thread, so the Xeons in the workstations are not as good as quad i7s with higher clock speeds. For work, I need lots of ECC RAM and lots of cores to run virtual machines -- a faster top speed is nice but not essential.

But d*mn, the used 5 year old workstations are built like tanks and the bang-for-buck is amazing.

[thatguy3339]

(07-15-2016, 04:41 AM)badfart1000 Wrote: I would suggest building your own PC and here are some parts I would recommend:
Nvidia  GTX 1070 graphics card
Intel 4790k processer (not latest gen but works fantastic)
16gb of ddr3 1866 mhz memory (ddr4 is pricey for not much more, and you shouldn't need more than 16gb)
I use the MSI Gaming 5 motherboard and it works great for me, but you need to make sure the motherboard is compatible with the processor.
As for cooling, if you get a coolermaster storm trooper/stryker (I have the trooper) it has plenty of case fans, so you shouldn't need to get any more than that.

If you don't want to build a computer and have a large budget I'd say go for Origin PC

Rowebot has a good suggestion on getting a workstation, but they aren't optomized for gaming, and so if you are looking to get very high end stuff workstations aren't the way to go.

Depending on budget it may be well worth it to sub in an RX 480 in place of the GTX 1070 (You lose some gaming performance but it's significantly cheaper). If you want to go even more budget you could probably even step down to an I5 or at the very least step down to the 4790 instead of the 4790k (assuming you wont be doing any overclocking)


Of course everything depends on budget and whether you actually want to build one. That being said if you want good performance for the price it's the best route.


If your budget is a little bit lower and you don't mind sacrificing some power for a better price and more heat output you could go for a full AMD machine that while it may not have the same power of a good Intel based system you can still get pretty decent gaming performance from.