It's time for me to buy a new desktop, as my old one isn't working so well anymore.
It also happens to be 'black Friday in July' which opens up the opportunity to perhaps get a good sale price somewhere.
Time is valuable, so I'm happy to spend a reasonably large amount if it actually matters, but I don't want to throw good money after nothing.
Given how many people would benefit from getting this question right, and how many people are likely to have good answers, I figured I'd ask here.
My specific goals are basically:
- Windows 11, I'm not open to negotiation on this one for various reasons.
- Will be able to open and rapidly switch between a ton of chrome tabs, including massive google sheets and google docs.
- General reliability and future-proofing.
- High-end gaming would be nice but mostly reliable medium-end gaming is fine.
- Handle at least 3+ monitors well.
- Relatively quiet fan is a big plus, especially loud ones are deal breakers.
- The usual other stuff you'd want a computer to be able to do these days.
Current top candidate after talking with one friend first is this Alienware PC configured with processor 12th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-12700KF (25 MB cache, 12 cores, 20 threads, 3.60 to 5.00 GHz Turbo), Win11 Pro, NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3080, 10 GB GDDR6X, LHR, 64 GB memory, HDD 1 TB, M.2, PCIe NVMe, SSD (with plan to also use the existing computer's HD as well) and Office Student.
Secondary possibility is Lenovo is having a massive sale on that includes the P620, seems like the more expensive versions are way more expensive than they need to be even post-sale so I'm suspicious (my old computer is a Lenovo and mostly was fine for a while until it wasn't).
Also very open to additional brands/possibilities.
UPDATE: Someone has volunteered to build it on my behalf, so yay. Still seems like a good question in general.
Linus Tech Tips has a secret shopper series where they (anonymously) order several prebuilts and test them out. They find that they vary greatly in quality, with Dell (which owns Alienware) being the absolute worst. iBUYPOWER takes the prize, with boutique brands Maingear and Origin PC doing well, but you will pay a price premium.
Gamers Nexus also reviews some prebuilts and finds a lot of them horrifically terrible, especially Alienware. Like, really, it's not that hard to build your own PC; how can these prebuilts be so incredibly incompetently built?
For those who aren't scared of the prospect, I highly recommend building your own. You may have to spend some time researching (I'm happy to recommend specific parts), but it's a process I enjoy, and it makes the computer feel much more "yours."
Considering that DIY is widely acknowledged to be viable, my prior is that the marketing around Alienware is bullshit and it’s just fine. Care to point to hard data that refutes this?