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?

There's a site that already does this, but for the life of me I can't remember which, they usually update each month depending on changes to components in the market..

Someone else will remember the link, it's been posted a few times, but I don't think it's a bad idea, will definitely generate a discussion, and will be more tek related, rather than posts about ties

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)

I couldn't even contemplate spending 3k on a computer! Back in the 90's yes, but now I'd struggle to see the point in spending over a grand surely with a monitor maybe on top of that? But saying that I haven't built a computer for years, but really?

What does he use it for MS Word and Facebook? 

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

He's a jet pilot = someone with more money than he knows what to do with it.

He likes to play Crysis and the likes, I suspect he's one of those people who are more concerned with how the game looks and the FPS than how it actually plays.

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

proper water cooling is quiet, "water cooling" bought off the shelf as a sealed unit........ usually costs the earth and doesn't perform in my experience. Admittedly it's been nearly 10 years since I build a WC rig, but I reckon that probably hasn't changed much.

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!

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

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers-guide/2012/05/18/pc-hardware-buyer-s-guide-may-2012/1

Will save you some time. 

PS. £3K is excessive now, you can build a decent PC with a decent monitor and accessories for under a grand.

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

Quote from: zpyder on May 20, 2012, 23:41:16 PM
Question is, do we just follow that, or come up with an alternative to their recommendations, if there is one?

You use that as a guide, the Gaming Workhorse is a good pc but you could cut back on the specs and save about £300 and then use that to buy either a big single or dual monitor setup etc, each to their own, i'm still running a first gen i5.

Quote from: zpyder on May 20, 2012, 23:37:13 PM

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..