Is It Just Me, Or Is it a Terrible Time to Build a PC?

[SaintERosa]

I myself had brought a prebuild from Dell, it was to kinda upgrade and compliment my terrible $400 laptop from Dell (it was good for normal use but not for watching HD content, games or programming my games).

It was a Dell Inspirom 3650 for about $450 USD about 3 years ago. It came with a i5 6th GEN CPU, some small Nvidia GPU that was cutely seated in the PCIEx16 slot (I think it was a x4 card), it had 1x8gb of ddr3L 1500MHz RAM, a 1TB Seagate HDD 7.2Krpm, an optical rw-DVD drive and a basic IO with HDMI and USB 3.0 all powered by a 250watt PSU.

The exact build from scratch using OEM would be $80 for the MB, $50 HDD, $60 PSU, $30 ddr3L RAM, the case $80 (based off ebay prices), you can get Win10 for free just need to tolerate a watermark and that little GPU I have no idea also the i5 is like $150 so I basically got what I paid for give or take a mouse and keyboard and a few bucks.

I upgraded its RAM with an extra 8gb of matching RAM (the MB supports only 16gb anyway and I barely used 50% of 8gb before I upgraded) that was like $30, a Zotac GTX 1080 Mini for $530 (good deal compared to $600+ 1080s at the time and it was NEW from Zotac), I got a Enermax Revolution SFX 650watt (80plusG) fully modular PSU for $120 (it was on sale), a Samsung EVO 350? 250Gb SATA SSD for $150?, then added a Noctua heatsink that was bigger than my stock cooler and it looked...cooler $60, I also got 2 fans from them (for exhaust and my make shift intake for the little side plate grill holes lol genius), I also got a PCIEx1 USB 3.0 card that gives me 4 3.0 ports that perform better than the two that are built into the MB (faster data transfers and charging, I confirmed two days ago, it was a big difference...to me), anyway I also used a Crucial 120gb SSD that I failed to clone my mother's OS to while upgrading her Inspiron 530...let's just say I now have a 60gb page file....so over all I am happy with my performance. I never have issues outside of my obsession with rebooting because it only takes 5 seconds!!!! Also I hooked her up to a 1440p screen at a plazing 60hz...I tried OC it but it doesn't actually provide a performance enhancement past 62hz (starts skipping frames).

I use this PC for playing Overwatch max settings (auto scale), CSGO (standard sets), Halo 5 Forge, ES3 Morrowind (because I need those high rez stretched pixels) and I just brought a VR game (called Revoke) without a VR headset (I ordered a cheapo unrated headset that uses your phone, ima try it today when I'm off work) and I use emulators because I'm a cheap criminal (actually my morals make me spend way too much money). I game on an Xbox One but it sucks cause my Halo 5 server connection is trash now a days (worse on ethernet than Wi-Fi, my router has faster Wi-Fi), I miss that game, definitely getting the new Infinite when it comes out for PC unless it gets trash reviews (within reason). But yeah my PC is pretty fast, I've been fighting the temptation to buy another MB and Case and more RAM (I have a fear of empty slots)).

In other words building a PC is expensive and I don't even care how my PC looks aside from the case (I wanna get a no window case for when I get a new MB) oh and I almost forgot...I bout a used i7-6700K (my motherboard doesn't OC) for $230? It works great and does well with the things I use it for like programming, and internet RESEARCH (actual research...).

[Locutus494]

12 hours ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

The funny thing is that Dell's own in house gaming line has been getting much better, much better than Alienware dare I must say. 

Yeah, I don't get why they kept the XPS line after buying Alienware. Kind of redundant product lines and target audience.

[Angel102]

ram and GPU prices certainly aren't helping matters, although they have finally started to improve thanks to a drop off in miniing demand and a few major lawsuits from the EU and China regarding artificially high pricing and restriction of supply has helped, vendors also looking to shift some old stock in regards to 10xx series Nvidia cards.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

7 hours ago, Locutus494 said:

Yeah, I don't get why they kept the XPS line after buying Alienware. Kind of redundant product lines and target audience.

Though XPS does sound much cooler than Alienware. As far as I can tell, Alienware is just there so their engineers can release their RGB fantasies.