Advice on building a PC

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JDFan:
Another thing you might want to consider is a refurbished off lease system from Dell or HP - they can be had pretty cheap and include just about everything you need - If you get a tower case and then just upgrade the Power supply ( if needed though the tower models usually have decent PSUs in them to begin with ) and Video card you can usually build it much cheaper than going from scratch

For example for $200 you can get a Lenovo M93 ( https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-ThinkCentre-M93P-MT-Desktop-PC-i5-4570-3-2GHz-12GB-RAM-1TB-Windows-10-Pro/174276382899?hash=item2893ae90b3:g:E3QAAOSwG4FetcZt ) with 12GB of Ram an i5 4570 CPU with a 1TB HDD and a fresh install of Win10 Pro - And that leaves plenty of room in your budget to do some upgrading of the PSU/Video card/SSD drive.

Howard_Casto:
I'm tempted to do that...That's what I've been doing in mame cabs for years. My mother works at a rather large business and every couple of years they upgrade their pcs (I guess because they like wasting money) and they sell off the old ones to employees for around $70. That and arrow direct means I rarely spend over $150 for a mame cabinet.

The thing is you are usually locked into what you are buying. The case and power supply are proprietary and the ram slots are typically full, so it makes it difficult to upgrade in the future. That being said what I usually end up upgrading over time is the graphics card and possibly the ram. I've never found it worth it to upgrade the cpu or the harddrive or anything like that.

I'm going to take another look tonight. I would like to get a processor nearing 4 ghz (or 4ghz when overclocked). That ought to future proof it for emulators anyway. In terms of pc games I'm not really a fps guy.... it's more like games that could have been released in an arcade (Mortal Kombat X and 11, ect.)

JDFan:

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on May 09, 2020, 08:59:26 pm ---That and arrow direct means I rarely spend over $150 for a mame cabinet.

--- End quote ---

Must have been awhile for you -- ArrowDirect has gotten out of the refurb business awhile back.

Howard_Casto:
I think I bought the last one a couple of years ago. it hasn't been that long.

Anyway I figured out what is going on. AMD is about to release some new ryzen 3 processors in a couple of weeks so Newegg and amazon are trying to get rid of all their old stock. Scalpers are buying them up and then re-selling for inflated prices. :angry:

So I guess the new pc might have to wait a while until things stabilize.

Howard_Casto:
You guys have answered my questions so I know what direction I'm headed, but in case this thread helps anyone I'm going to keep it going until my purchases are complete and the pc is built and running. I went ahead and bought a ssd. It's just a cheapo sata 512gb I found on amazon. No m2, but every now and again they put the smaller ones on sale...if there's a good price I could always buy that later on.

As for the cpu and gpu, I found this video:

First off MK11 (and MKX for that matter) is kind of odd. Cut scenes and menus seem to hover around 30fps, but once actual gameplay is started it's a rock-solid 60fps and that's at max settings. Newegg currently has this card on sale for $120 after rebate (135 without). That's pretty inexpensive and it runs my target game at 60fps in 4k. So I guess that's the video card I'm getting. MK11 is fairly graphically rich compared to the stuff I normally play, so that should do fine. Also take note of the processor usage..... it's a 12 thread running around 4ghz and basically only about half of them are being used with only one being really taxed (maxing out at 40%) at a time. It makes me think perhaps my cpu target is a little overkill. The problem is nothing mid-end or higher is at a good price right now due to the reasons I mentioned before. A ryzen 5 3600 is on sale for $175, but do I really want to pay that much over my intended target? Will any emulators that actually need a lot of processing power (like mame) take advantage of the power if it's split over 12 threads? Things to think about at least.

Oh if you guys are bored you could always look at cases for me....My problem with selecting a case is there are just too many to look through. I'm looking for something around $50 or less that looks cool. I don't want it tacky, but at the same time I haven't built a real gaming pc since the 00's, so I might as well do it right. I'll post some links to good ones as I find them in case anyone else is looking.

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