Desktop decisions - advice welcomed!

[lnr]

Mike has bought himself a new shiny desktop, and now I'm looking at what to do with what we've still got in the house, or whether to buy in an entire new machine.

I'm currently running a 4th gen i7, with a Radeon GT1030 and 12GB of memory, and a 512MB SSD. But the motherboard and processor and some of the memory technically still belong to work.

I was thinking of migrating my computer's brain into Mike's old machine, but it turns out that's a 3rd gen i7, so less good, though it has a Radeon GTX1070 instead, so much better graphics. I could probably get some performance improvement by sticking that in my chassis (*if* it has enough power) and seeing if I can up the memory too.

Or I could spend 900 quid on a 10th gen i7 system from Dell with the Radeon GTX 1650 super, it only comes with 8GB of memory but that's on one DIMM so almost certainly possible to add more from our stock.

Have decided against spending a small fortune on the shiny gaming PCs they also have available, as I'm just not enough into ALL THE POWER, and mostly it would just be nice to have something that actually belongs to me and can at some point do Windows 11, which neither of the existing i7s are new enough for.

The 900 quid Dell Inspiron is looking quite tempting. Anyone want to suggest other ideas?

Comments

[sparrowsion]

Normally I'd say that for a desktop, if you know what your requirements are, then go and get a custom job from somewhere like QuietPC (who were pretty helpful in making sure my spec was sane). Because off-the-shelf machines are unlikely to have a CPU/GPU suitable for anything other than office work or high-end gaming, and they never come with enough memory. But if you've got the memory going spare and know it will fit the Dell, that doesn't look like a bad choice.

[lnr]

Lots of discussion on Facebook too has been really helpful.

It sounds like my memory will be too old, but the GPU will be better than what I'm prepared to pay for now, so getting a new machine built (in this case PC Specialist seem to have a good set of choices) with just onboard graphics and migrating Mike's GPU is looking like a good solution for just under 800:

11th gen i7
32GB Ram
512GB PCIe SSD

[lnr]

PC now chosen and ordered £842 from PC Specialist including a better fan and PSU than I'd originally selected - they checked everything was compatible and told me how much power the system would use so I'd know how much extra was left for the graphics card! And they've even asked me which graphics card I'm using so they can install/route the cables nicely to make room for it!

[catyak]

To me, the important thing is memory. I'm still using an i5 from 2013 that I built from scratch, but it's had 32GB RAM in it for most of that time and is good for most of what I do. Mind you, I do run Linux and don't bother with action games (graphics controller is a GTX750) and it's still perfectly adequate for that. It got fitted with an SSD for /usr some time ago (when 64GB was a lot) to keep the program load speed up, but otherwise it's pretty much the same as it started apart from the extra pound or two of dust inside it.

[lnr]

Switching to SSD really does make a difference, doesn't it?

[catyak]

Most storage is still on traditional hard drives, but yes, having the system files on SSD helps a lot. Also makes software upgrades easier, because my data is on a separate disk to where all the reformatting and installation takes place.

[damerell]

Take what you can find; between the plague, the global semiconductor shortage, fucking Brexit, and the damned cryptocurrency cultists, stocks of everything are limited.

FWIW at work we have found Scan relatively good at telling us what they have in stock and telling the truth about it. Dell also not too bad.

[lnr]

I would be glad to see the back of the crypto cult. A new machine with lots of memory and Mike's old card is what I've gone for, for just under 850, and should be here in a couple of weeks. I should be able to do a GPU update in a couple of years if prices get more sensible, or probably even if they don't but we've not just spent loads on other things :)