I was round at my sisters earlier today and her partner showed me his £3000 computer. It was pretty obscene and overkill, but got me thinking about what different budgets will get you.

I was wondering whether people think it would be interesting to have a couple of threads for different budgets, say low(£400), mid(£750), high(£1000) and "sick" (£2000+)

The idea being that they are stickied, the first post has a spec in it for that budget range, and as people find deals, or a better component comes on the market, it gets updated. it would be a good first point of call for people needing a starting point for system building, and It could lead to interesting discussion when there are alternative options etc?

Thoughts?

I'm particularly interested as I just can't help but feel the £3000 computer was excessive. If you were to plot the "bang for buck" I'd say that it's quite a steep curve which at some point plateaus out, and I think his computer was somewhere along the plateau.

From memory he had:

i7 extreme CPU (don't know which one, but assume top line)
2x 1tb HDD's (I thought this was a bit low, primary HDD was a barracuda)
16gb ram
2x Nvidia 480s I think
water cooled
27" 3D monitor.
MahOOSIVE tower unit. Thinking about it, it was pretty loud, I thought watercooled computers were meant to be quiet... (It had a massive fan in the top of the tower, and he's placed it on his desk so he can look at the pretty insides...=noise)

£2k+ = iMac
roll on developers conference. My PC died last week & I have a hole burning in my pocket.

There is a cool silent set up for a hackintosh that is surfing that boundry if you look for the blackintosh on youtube you'll find it.

Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk 2

U2711 monitor is £500 notes, but I'd struggle to spend even a grand more tbh, even with SSDs in raid and a top end Ivy Bridge i7

Let's get the threads going then 

We'll soon find out how much a high end rig should cost, without spending money for the sake of it!

Don't forget the low end rigs too

Question is, do we just follow that, or come up with an alternative to their recommendations, if there is one?

Quote from: XEntity on May 20, 2012, 23:12:21 PM

Let's get the threads going then 

We'll soon find out how much a high end rig should cost, without spending money for the sake of it!

Don't forget the low end rigs too

Boring!!

What are the rules? Are we including monitor prices, I'd say no and have something separate for monitors?

Edit: Another thought, do we want to do it by price or by use? i.e. could also spec HTPCs, servers etc..