$2000 Dell credit to burn

[faeriespryte]

So a family member is offering to let me buy a computer with their Dell $2000 credit line (it's actually 3k, but I don't want to max out their card). This will be purchased in the US.

I don't have the option of building my own desktop from scratch (someday I'd like to), so I'd like to gather some opinions on what's the best investment I could make here? Perhaps something that allows me to modify in the future? I do enjoy playing MMO's like WoW and Guild Wars.. I'd like something that could handle such games at decent settings. Any alternate suggestions are welcome, but again please note I only have the option of purchasing with Dell. Below are some systems I picked out through browsing. What do you think?

Alienware x51
16GB (2 X 8GB) Dual Channel DDR3 up to 1600MHz
1TB SATA 3Gb/s (7,200RPM) 32MB Cache
Slot-Loading Dual Layer DVD Burner (DVD±RW, CD-RW)
Dell U2312HM 23-Inch UltraSharp™ Monitor
Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64Bit, English
3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3770 (8M Cache, up to 3.4 GHz)
1.5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660
330W External Power Supply

XPS 8500
Windows 8, 64-bit, English
Microsoft® Office trial
Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24"W Monitor, 24.0 Inch VIS,
3Yr PREMIUM PANEL Ltd. Warranty, 3 yr Advanced Exchange
12GB Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz - 4 DIMMs
Blu-ray Combo Drive (BD-R, DVD+/-RW), Write to CD/DVD
2TB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive + Intel® SRT 32GB SSD
AMD Radeon HD 7770
Integrated 7.1 with WAVE MAXXAudio 4
White w/19:1 Media Card Reader
3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3770 processor (up to 3.90 GHz)
No speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
Dell Wireless 1703 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth v4.0+LE
Integrated 10/100/1000 Ethernet

Alienware Aurora R4
Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64Bit, English
2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3820 (10M Cache, Overclocked up to 4.1 GHz)
8GB (4 X 2GB) Quad Channel DDR3 at 1600MHz
1.25GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 560 Ti
1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3Gb/s
Dell U2312HM 23-Inch UltraSharp™ Monitor
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Single Drive: 24X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/double layer write capability

 

[nsafreak]

Of that bunch I would say go with the XPS 8500 build but make a few changes. Go with 16GB of RAM instead of 12GB of RAM and swap the Radeon HD 7770 to a 7850. I would also swap the 2TB & SSD cache drive setup for a 2TB HDD with a 256GB SSD drive. Having a pure SSD for your OS and applications will be a huge improvement vs just having a caching setup. The XPS line is a lot more friendly to upgrade down the road and generally holds up pretty well.

 

[faeriespryte]

Thank you! I did go with the XPS 8500. Only upgraded the gfx card because I wanted to get a nice monitor. I'll hopefully be able to upgrade the rest in the future. Thanks again.