What are your preferences, and what is your budget? (And be prepared for a parade of people who will instruct you to purchase a Mac.)

It would help us to know what you plan to use it for.

@dpworkin I know… what’s up with that!

god fuck I don’t want a mac fucking trolls

that being said, I want to use it for recording music and playing cool games. I would like to be done with 1000 euro (basically the same as a dollar at this point) but I’m not sure if that’s realistic. I want something that can keep up with all the crazy shit I’m going to be doing and has no other functions.

Here is a site which will allow you to configure a computer to meet your needs at your preferred price.

If you can build the thing yourself. It’s not that hard if you are slightly technically minded and it gives you the freedom to choose exactly the components you want and need.

I would recomend an intel i5 750 CPU. If you install a decent cooler you can comfortably overclock it to 4Ghz. For the graphics card it kinda depends on the resolution of your monitor. An ATI HD 5850 is a pretty solid chioce and will run anything you can throw at it at 1600×1050. At higher resolutions you may have to turn off the AA in some games but even so it will work well. 4GB of ram is the minimum you should look at but its not worth spending for more than that at the moment but you can always add more if you need to later.

Except for playing games, you can get yourself a fairly powerful machine for that price. But if you want to play games, you’ll need to spend twice that for a low-end gaming machine. So if games are your primary desire, you’ll be better off getting yourself a console (either an Xbox or a Playstation. Personally, I’m partial to the Xbox, but what you want to do is first choose the games you want, then choose the console that plays those games).

@HungryGuy That’s entirely untrue, depending on the type of machine. For 2k euro i could make a god of gaming PCs. The only time you’d spend that much is if you really, really want an alienware, and they’re a waste of money in my opinion. i just bought my PC last year for $1200 including a nice 23” flat panel monitor. I can play almost anything you care to mention at high graphics, 1600×1040 resolution (except possibly crysis, though i do make the requirements). Now, if you’re going for a notebook, that will cost you more, but a desktop is easy to keep in that range. Even a very good gaming notebook i could get for under $1500.

That said, I suggest building yourself if you have the gumption and the time. However, no matter the route, there really isn’t simply one good unbiased site for reviews and benchmarks of all components. You’re going to have to do research on each and every part if you want that. It can be done, and I find it quite fun, but that’s up to you. Otherwise, i think @Lightlyseared has some good advice, and you can easily use those names to build a computer on a computer store’s website, though i admit i don’t know one for Europe. The place i build my last four computers at, IBuyPower, only ships to north america. Sorry :-/

[EDIT]: also, jsut to say, gaming on a PC and console are very different, so saying “if you want gaming go console” isn’t necessarily good advice. I have quite a few consoles and game on them a lot, but PC gaming is very different. Superior in many ways, though admittedly pricier. But, it’s very much a matter of taste.

@HungryGuy I agree with @BhacSsylan that you overestimate prices, unless you know something about the economy in Europe that I don’t. I didn’t even bargain-hunt for a decently powerful computer for $500. Had I gone with some higher-specs and put a little effort into comparison shopping, I could’ve had at least three times the machine for well under a grand.

@Lightlyseared Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the new, unlocked i7–875K? Sure, it’s $150 more, but also a bit more powerful and thus more future-proof. Personally, I’d rather spend $340 off the bat and upgrade in 3–4 years than $195 and be grumbling (or upgrading) within 2 years. And if you shop around, the rest of the system will be cheap enough that you can splurge a little and still be under a grand.
Personally, I draw the line on RAM at 4GB for Core2 and older chips and 6GB for the 3-channel Core i3/5/7, but that may just be me being silly.

@BhacSsylan Console games brag about 1080p graphics, yet I cannot remember the last time I ran a game at that low a resolution :D

@jerv that depends much on his computer literacy, the i7 probably won’t be as worth it if he won’t overclock it. At least, that’s what i’d expect since you suggest the unlocked version. But, i haven’t been keeping up on the i7 (still a few years before i need to upgrade my quad core, hopefully), so i could be misunderstanding.

And yeah, that always makes me laugh. Silly people and their obsession with big numbers they don’t understand :-p

@Zyx Since this conversation has gotten a teeny bit off track, care to weigh in on building yourself vs someone else, and how helpful @Lightlyseared and @jerv‘s suggestions are? because i can see our conversation being a load of gibberish if it wasn’t the advice you were asking for.

Dell has a line of high-end gaming PCs. But I believe that the gold standard in pre-built game machines is Alienware.

@Nullo As I said, total waste of money. Also, I think Dell bought Alienware, or teamed up or something, so that Dell’s high end gaming comps are, in fact, Alienwares. Which still aren’t worth it.

I just went and checked, to be sure. A computer with similar specs to mine, which i bought for 1200 a year and a half ago, is $2,004.76 from alienware, after taxes and shipping. I mean, come on. Oh, and the ‘preliminary ship date’ is a week and a half away. What gives? Completely not worth it at all, unless you want bragging rights, maybe. But you’ll be beat by the guy that says “Oh, i built mine myself. For a quarter of the price. And it has a better 3DMark score”.

@BhacSsylan Of course the DIY is going to have better specs for the money. The question is, does the OP want to DIY?

@Nullo Alienware is Dell, and is notoriously overpriced. One can do far better in having a computer built to spec.

@Nullo I didn’t even build my own. Otherwise i could have done better then $1200. I built it at IBuyPower, as i said in my first post. I, personally, am not confident enough in my skill to build my own (though maybe next time), though i did buy this desktop to upgrade and keep for the next decade or so. That’s why I have been suggesting that he take the specs they’ve, been giving him and take them to a computer realtor that isn’t horrendously overpriced.

@dpworkin The same with IBuyPower, Cyberpower doesn’t ship to europe, as far as I can tell.

@BhacSsylan Okay, so I have a soft spot for hyperthreading, which means that the i7 can act like an 8-core CPU at times and the i5 lacks.

Seems like loads of useful unformation here, but you’ve convinced me I’m going to have to build this bitch myself. I hadn’t even looked into that seriously, but I think there’s a shitload of tutorials for stuff like that online. Thanks everyone!

@jerv an i5 750 is better value for money than the i7–875K. Its 50% more expensive but not 50% more powerful. The only significant features are the hyperthreading which doesn’t give you much of a boost anyway Also given how easy the 750 can be overclocked to 4ghz on air with out any effort than your throwing your money away on the i7–875K. If you really want an i7 with hyperthreading then your much better off getting an 1136 socket based i7 like the 930 but then your whole system is going to cost significantly more.

The trick to buying a PC is to get the most bang for your buck NOW. There’s no point spending twice as much on a high end PC this year because you think it will last a couple of years more. By then a mid range PC will have more power than your 2 year old pc.

Get one with high numbers. Seriously. The higher the numbers the better the computer.

@Lightlyseared True. My line of reasoning was that the i7–875K has benchmark scores that are 50% higher at stock speeds, both are easy to overclock, and that apps are taking advantage of multi-threading more and more as time goes on thus making hyperthreading a good thing and better as software advances.
The fact that the 875K is also faster than the 950 (therefore notably faster than the 930) is also a plus, especially considering that it’s an 1156 chip and not a 1366. Compared to other CPUs, the 875K is still mid-range (pricewise), unlike the LGA1366 chips, and I would not have even mentioned it if the price was comparable to the $560-ish of the i7–870 that it is replacing

Getting the best bang for the buck is a tricky balancing act and a guessing game. I find that the mid-range stuff is usually the best way to go though. It’s more future-proof than the budget stuff but without the hefty premium of the high-end stuff which tends to have a price tag that is totally out of proportion to the actual performance gain.

And, of course, there are always going to be differences of opinion as to the best route.

Good question, for $500 – $700 once can purchase a computer that will be more than sufficient for gaming, let alone our regular tasks such as word processing.