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.
Btw, if you care a lot about noise, you can
1) get ultra long display cables (ruipro), can get 144hz 4k support 100ft+ no problem, and just put your PC elsewhere. I personally just swap cables, to move my work setup between my sitting multimon workstation, to my standing treadmill desk, to my TV, to my couch PC setup.
2) If you are crazy like me, multiroom water cooling is an option as well.