Desktop Necessities these days for a new PC?

[Scarpozzi]

I've got a 10 year old PC. I'm looking at setting up a new box for gaming.

I used to build systems all the time, but worked so much with server hardware that I gave up on building desktops.

Can someone lay out the top things I should look for in a PC? I just bought 2 new LED monitors for cheap (DVI) and are looking for something that can take advantage of those. Can someone throw out the standards for me right now for a solid rig?

My work PC's the past 5 years have Dells with 16GB ram and an i5-2400 @ 3.10Ghz. (I'm due a new PC next week at work, so I don't know what it's being replaced with)

What Processor should I look for in a gaming PC?
What kind of RAM should the system have? (I'll likely expand whatever's stock to 16GB+ after initial purchase to save money)
Should I go SSD? (I haven't have one yet)
What kind of video card is the standard these days?

Finally, if you have any decent off the shelf PCs in mind, shoot me a link. I'm wanting to keep my initial buy under $500 and will upgrade as needed. I'm not opposed to refurbished hardware and I have a near empty 2TB RAID NAS that I can connect to over GigE, so hard drive space isn't that big of a deal.

 

[Yuriman]

$500 is pretty tight these days, especially if you need an OS too. This probably belongs in General Hardware.

Your best bet is likely to be a retired server barebones (~$250 eBay special w/ Haswell i3?), add a hard drive (~$100 250GB SSD?) and GPU (~$120 GTX 950?). This will be a little weak in a lot of modern games, but should provide playable framerates at medium settings. This doesn't take a Windows license into account, but any lower on the hardware and you're not likely to be very happy with your machine.

 

[Scarpozzi]

$500 is pretty tight these days, especially if you need an OS too. This probably belongs in General Hardware.

Your best bet is likely to be a retired server barebones (~$250 eBay special w/ Haswell i3?), add a hard drive (~$100 250GB SSD?) and GPU (~$120 GTX 950?). This will be a little weak in a lot of modern games, but should provide playable framerates at medium settings. This doesn't take a Windows license into account, but any lower on the hardware and you're not likely to be very happy with your machine.

I put it here in Pre-Built/Barebones because I'm thinking I'm looking for one of the two.

Thanks for the reply. OS is a little bit of a concern. If I didn't care about gaming at all, I'd stick with Linux and just plan on throwing Windows on a Virtual Machine. I may actually do that, but kind of considered getting back into flight sims and a few first person shooters for nostalgia's sake.

 

[giantpandaman2]

I put it here in Pre-Built/Barebones because I'm thinking I'm looking for one of the two.

Thanks for the reply. OS is a little bit of a concern. If I didn't care about gaming at all, I'd stick with Linux and just plan on throwing Windows on a Virtual Machine. I may actually do that, but kind of considered getting back into flight sims and a few first person shooters for nostalgia's sake.

At $500 I might just consider a PS4 or XB1 and call it a day. $500 will give a severely compromised gaming experience. If not I'd really suggest throwing this in General Hardware as those guys are always seeing some pretty ridiculous deals. Going used, as Yuriman suggested, would be a good alternate route. If you stick to PC I'd definitely get an SSD. Win10 can get by with a 128 GB SSD primary drive pretty easily. My 128 GB laptop SSD has 86 GB free with Win10, Office360, and a smattering of applications installed. An SSD speeds up your system more than having a faster CPU. Only thing that might make a bigger difference is going from 4GB of RAM to 8GB. (Who would only get 4 GB of RAM nowadays anyhow?)

 

[Scarpozzi]

SSD is my plan if I can snag a drive for cheap. I'll keep my eyes open for deals used, refurbished, and barebones. I'm not in a huge rush because my office turned into a second nursery 2 years ago...I still don't know where I'm gonna park this system yet.

I plan on getting XB1 in the next year or so. The only games I prefer on PC are flight sims and first person shooters... Most of all, I'm wanting a system I can do data analytics on with 2 monitors because I'm tired of doing stuff like that on my laptop. Most of what I do doesn't require a fast system, but memory would be a requirement. I'll likely look at SSD with a secondary 1-2TB drive and then map a drive to my NAS for a 2nd copy of my data.

 

[MrTeal]

What are the specs for case, PSU, etc for your old computer, and do you need a new keyboard, mouse, etc?

 

[Scarpozzi]

What are the specs for case, PSU, etc for your old computer, and do you need a new keyboard, mouse, etc?

It's an old HP system. I'd have to start this one from scratch, barebone, or purchase. I'm cool with all three methods, but don't want to build a computer that draws attention to itself. I have kids and don't want them to notice the PC....plain black box would work.

 

[JWade]

actually, $500 isn't bad, right now delloutlet.com home is having a sale, 30% off most systems, after coupon code (on their website) you can get an xps 8700 with an i7-4790 for under $500, can even sometimes get an 8900 with an i5 for under $500 too. good startng base, usually come with a 720 or 730 video card though

here is one current example, after coupon. not bad for a prebuilt I don't think, though I picked up the i7 version for the same price: $459
Processor: Intel Core 4th Generation i5-4460 Processor (6MB Cache, up to 3.4GHz)
• Windows 8.1 Pro (Free Upgrade to Windows 10 Pro)
• 1TB 7200 rpm SATA 6Gb/s Hard Drive
• 8 GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1600MHz (2x 4GB) Non-ECC
• 16X DVD +/- RW Drive
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 720 1GB DDR3
• Dell Outlet XPS 8700