Looking for a new work/mild gaming computer

[Baboosh]

[peacedivision]

If you spending money for a 4770, get the K model so you can overclock it.

Ram is so cheap just get 2x8 or 4x8gb, no point buying 12gb and filling all 4 slots.

If you buy a 4770/4770K and pair it with a GTX645, you will end up replacing it with something faster. Suck it up and buy a 670 or 770

Don't cheap out on the power supply and cooling.

[Baboosh]

I'm not building it, it's a Dell XPS so my options are kinda limited.

I don't really modify or overclock, my current PC is 5 years old but I did replace the video card about a year ago.

If you spending money for a 4770, get the K model so you can overclock it.

Ram is so cheap just get 2x8 or 4x8gb, no point buying 12gb and filling all 4 slots.

If you buy a 4770/4770K and pair it with a GTX645, you will end up replacing it with something faster. Suck it up and buy a 670 or 770

Don't cheap out on the power supply and cooling.

[peacedivision]

Ahh, well I've had good luck with dells.

I have an old Inspiron core 2 duo from 2008 still going strong.

If you aren't going to build yourself, the specs are fine for your needs.

*the power supply probably sucks, upgrading video cards in the future may be a pain.

[Baboosh]

[bigbearbear]

What kind of work do you plan to do with the PC? An i7 is nice but mostly overkill unless you're running virtual machines.

Also, will the system come with SSD or regular spinning hard drive? These days, the hard drive type have major impact on the overall performance of the PC. SSDs are excellent unless you need a lot of bulk storage.

[Baboosh]

What kind of work do you plan to do with the PC? An i7 is nice but mostly overkill unless you're running virtual machines.

Also, will the system come with SSD or regular spinning hard drive? These days, the hard drive type have major impact on the overall performance of the PC. SSDs are excellent unless you need a lot of bulk storage.

Not very intensive work, we use proprietary software as well as a contact database.

Hard drive is:
1TB SATA 6Gb/s (7,200RPM) 64MB Cache

[NytWolf]

What kind of work do you plan to do with the PC? An i7 is nice but mostly overkill unless you're running virtual machines.

Also, will the system come with SSD or regular spinning hard drive? These days, the hard drive type have major impact on the overall performance of the PC. SSDs are excellent unless you need a lot of bulk storage.

What type of performance are you talking about? Unless you care about how fast your computer gets to the logon screen or how fast your word processing application loads, it's a "hurry up and wait game". You're not going to see much performance in your everyday activities unless you are playing computer games which have a lot of data to load.

[bigbearbear]

What type of performance are you talking about? Unless you care about how fast your computer gets to the logon screen or how fast your word processing application loads, it's a "hurry up and wait game". You're not going to see much performance in your everyday activities unless you are playing computer games which have a lot of data to load.

It depends on what you're doing, if you're reading large files (eg. video editing or loading VMs), the SSD will be well worth the money. Many application server type software (eg. MS SharePoint) also requires a lot of read operations before they "warm up" enough, the SSD will make a major difference.

Even if you're doing basic stuff like Word processing, the SSD is nice because you don't have to wait for the bazillion COM add-ons that other vendors like to install on top of your MS Word (antivirus, Adobe Acrobat etc). MS Word will open very fast and it is nice if you're constantly working on it.

[bigbearbear]

Not very intensive work, we use proprietary software as well as a contact database.

Hard drive is:
1TB SATA 6Gb/s (7,200RPM) 64MB Cache

I would go with a lower end CPU (eg. i5) and spend the money on a SSD storage if that's the case. Very few application software these days required massive computing powers so unless you're running a lot of virtual machines, doing cryptography or video/photo editing, the fast CPU is mostly wasted.

On the other hand, a Windows computer spends a lot of time reading/writing to its disk drives. Boot up, launching applications, Windows update, virus updates, backup and the automatic drive optimization etc. I've found that money spent on a SSD contributes to better overall performance. You'll find that your computer boots up very fast and applications launch/close instantly.

[mr2thomas]

if you can fork a bit extra for the 4770k i would. Processors are hardest to upgrade in the long run so you want to spend the money on that.

[NytWolf]

It depends on what you're doing, if you're reading large files (eg. video editing or loading VMs), the SSD will be well worth the money. Many application server type software (eg. MS SharePoint) also requires a lot of read operations before they "warm up" enough, the SSD will make a major difference.

Even if you're doing basic stuff like Word processing, the SSD is nice because you don't have to wait for the bazillion COM add-ons that other vendors like to install on top of your MS Word (antivirus, Adobe Acrobat etc). MS Word will open very fast and it is nice if you're constantly working on it.

I wouldn't use an SSD for a server application. I'll leave it at that.

On the client end, it's still a "hurry up and wait" game. So instead of loading in 5 seconds, it takes another 15 seconds. Once the application is up, it's up and waiting on the user anyway.

[Peter.Steele]

4770 is a beast. That's what I'm sitting on right now (well, 4770k), and I love it. It might need more cooling, depending on how hard you're pushing it, but once I changed the thermal paste out for something else the temperatures settled down.

Be a shame to put that CPU with something as low as a 645, though. Get a 660, at least.

Also, 12 GB of RAM? That's silly, and a cop-out. Get 16, at least. Whatever memory you get, though, do it in 8 GB single-stick increments, and you'll be able to expand up to the full 32 that the board will support, which will help your future-proofing to some extent.

i7 - as mentioned earlier - is only a good thing if you're doing lots of multi-threaded stuff. I need it because I do a lot of rendering and engineering simulations, which are massively multithreaded and which run me at 100% CPU usage for very, very long stretches of time.

SSD is a good thing too. If you're not multithreaded, skip the i7, get an i5-4670 and then spend the extra on an SSD.

[stilly]

I'm not building it, it's a Dell XPS so my options are kinda limited.

I don't really modify or overclock, my current PC is 5 years old but I did replace the video card about a year ago.

Then ask for NO graphics card and add one in yourself.