Another 'help me pick a computer' thread

I'm looking to replace my PC. My price point is ~$800, and I'll be using it primarily for gaming and internets.
I don't need any peripherals.

Here is what one of my ex-students recommended. He's fairly savvy, but a 2nd opinion is always nice.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16883101354

He also said,
"If you go with AMD you'll get more raw power but they take time to break in, if you go with NVIDIA you'll get more user friendlyness. Based on what I know about your gaming habits the other benefits are worthless to you. I suggest AMD. Probably a ryzen5 series and an r7 gpu."
He does know my gaming habits pretty well. Any 2nd opinion on this?

Thanks.

I'm actually in the same boat so have had to read up some. I used to follow tech and build systems years ago. I'd go with a Ryzen 5 too, optimally a 1600. RAM prices suck though, about double what they were a year ago. GPU depends on which games and at what resolution you play at. For 1080p modern games probably an AMD RX580 or Geforce GTX1060, although their prices are inflated too due to cryptomining. Not a good time to be buying.

That Acer seems ok, at 1080p you might need to dial down settings on some games but it should be fine otherwise. 8GB ram isn't a lot, but I'm sure you can upgrade that later.

This is kind of a shitty time to buy a PC. DDR4 prices are at twice what they were a year ago: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
And what Cocco said about gpu's. If you can, wait 2-3 months because that's when nvidia will push their new toys and at least gpu prices should fall again.
But with that said, you can still get a really good system for $800. What your friend said about AMD kinda makes sense. Hardware doesn't "break in" but ryzen might still have some early adopter issues and might require you to flash the bios after an overclock fails or for compatibility down the line, and that could look really scary to some people, but really isn't.

I would definitely not get a 1050 in a gaming system. You can get a used 980TI for less and it will outperform the 1050 by a good margin. If you insist on buying new, you can still get something better than a 1050 in a $800 system. PSU used prices are always in the dumpster, so I'd always recommend something like a Seasonic 450w for $20 than getting whatever noname brand new for 3x the price.
It also has the added benefit of maybe getting a really good combo deal for MB/Ram/CPU from people who are oblivious to the DDR price hike. For example I just saw a local ad from someone selling a 4790k with MB and 32gig for little more than what the current street price of the memory alone is. Hardware with non-moving parts doesn't go bad over time. Thermal compound on CPU's and GPU's is what you should change, but anyone can do that.

At $800 I'd definitely buy used. If you don't need super high framerates you could get away with a 4690k and a 1080. If you don't have a 144hz display and you're not looking to get one, that's a reasonable combo. The only time you really want to spend a good chunk of your budget on the CPU is if you need to get high framerates out of ubisoft and activision games, or you do a lot of other work that requires a lot of cpu power.

I would say buy that gangster ass gangster laptop you guys got me to get a year or whatever ago, except it's sold out. im convinced this thing was the best bang for buck laptop on the market at the time. next to zero problems other than user error, super fast, cheap as balls. so yeah, thanks again for the rec.

Honestly, I consider computers to be almost disposable now.

Ever go lawnmower shopping? It's really really really hard to justify spending $4K on a shiny, feature-rich, ride-on rig when you can just buy a flimsy push unit for $99 and just replace it every two years. Both lawnmowers cut grass equally well. In the end, that's all that really matters.

I feel the same way about computers. My 3-year old laptop was running kinda slow and getting bitchy. So I junked it and bought a new one. Just went to Best buy and bought bought a $600 Dell laptop/tablet combo thingy and I'm in business. I'll probably chuck it in the garbage in another two or three years and never even think about it.

When I think of all the things I use a computer for...$200/year seems cheap. I pay twice that every month for my car, with gas and insurance, it's 3x. And I use that only about a tenth as much.

And specs schmecks if you ask me. Even the shittiest computers today can do 99.9% of what you ask them to do virtually instantly. The exception obviously is anything graphic intensive like design softwares and games. And frankly, based on all the alphabet-soup already in this thread, PC gaming sounds like a complicated chore. Just spend $500 on a computer and $300 on a gaming console...problem solved.

That all being said, the only feature that is an absolute dealbreaker for me when buying a computer is a light-up keyboard.

I agree with coco and oskar, a ryzen 5 1600 cpu with a gtx 1060 gpu would be great if you can get it for your budget. and squeeze in an SSD if you can

At this point I wouldn't even put an ssd as optional. At least for the OS. Nvidia just announced a $3k GPU that outperforms their previous flagship by about 30% which is a good sign for things to come. This is a huge jump and by the way Nvidia does things their flagships are basically only there to make their next consumer line look like a bargain. So if this is foreshadowing how the 11 series will perform that will mean that the 11 series will in reality be massive overkill for anyone, but 10xx and 9xx series GPU prices will get absolutely dumpstered. I'm already seeing people dropping their 970's for 150. This will be below 100 by March most likely.