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What is your budget?
We already bought one, exceeded what we initially wanted to spend, but happy with our decision!
hi Novica, mind if I ask what specs you went with as I am also considering a new desktop. I have a laptop which only has 2gb nvidea graphics card and 8 gbs of ram, great for most things except Daz Studio
I don't mind- I shopped at the different sites for several days before I asked for help (got more and more bogged down before I did) and ended up buying directly from Dell (good warranty, paid for one year premium support so installation/any issues were covered. One thing that I don't want, is frustration with getting support after I buy the product, and I know I will have everything installed/twiddled with within the first few months so I didn't need 2-3 years (and it was a rip off, as usual.) I remember when you could get excellent support from companies without having to PAY for it. Sheesh. Anyway, I liked the Alienware because of the shape, as mentioned, it slopes and therefore when it vents the air is blown out and up, instead of into the wall, and there's several more inches for it to disperse into the air and not bounce back toward the computer.
The Amazon ones were good but had 16GB instead of 32 GB RAM, or had the 32 but then the graphics card was 2GB and not 4GB. To find the right combination of both, it was straight from Dell. But as someone mentioned, that changes often on Amazon. Sam's Club also had the lesser RAM, but they do have computers so be sure and take a look and see. I've had a Dell for the past 5 years and never had problems with it, but with Iray, I'm really slooooooow. So the specs on the one I went with (and not cheap, warn you in advance it's a take-awhile-to-pay-this-off-and keep-it-forever! purchase
It's a Dell Alienware Area-51 computer with an Intel i7 Six Core, 32 GB of RAM, a GTX 970 (1664 CUDA cores) with 4GB RAM on the video card (going 6 was $1000 more, forget it) It has a 2TB harddrive.
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K (6-cores, 15MB Cache, Overclocked up to 3.8 GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
Kharma, I PM'd you so be sure and check your messages.
For you technical people, this review shows and details the cooling system and the internal workings of the Alienware Area 51. They are discussing mostly the $4000 model (forget it!) but it's built the same.
logicalincrements.com is a pretty good rule of thumb for best value, minus cases. Videocards have been discussed pretty well so far. More VRAM the better.
Sounds like you got a decent machine. Congratulations!
However, I should warn you, if you go into the box for any reason (upgrading memory, swapping out display adapters, whatever) this will void the warranty. Any and all service or hardware upgrades MUST be done by Dell-certified technicians.
It is my biggest beef with Dell. Well, that and the fact that the company's founder and CEO, Michael Dell, is a weapons-grade @$$h0le! An old-school slave-driver! An old friend took a job with the company, and found out, early on, that 70+-hour work-weeks were not only not uncommon, they were expected.
I resolved, when I learned about it, that I would never give that 'zalupa' (Russian slang for 'd!ckh3ad') any of my money.
Don't blame you. But then, you'd probably have to never buy anything from Amazon either. I believe there was an undercover story about how they treated their warehouse employees a couple years ago. I felt really bad for them.
By the time I would want to upgrade or do anything, it'd be time to buy another computer. I hang on to mine for 5-8 years, and it would be so obsolete and expensive to fix this one I'd be better off getting recent technology. So talk to me in 2024...
So talk to me in 2024...
Assuming I'm still alive...!
Got it this afternoon, setting it up now, but OMGosh, zippity do dah fast! Before I can even blink it's on the next page, it just reminds me how slow my lil laptop was (had for about 5 years.) I won't be rendering anything for a day or so as I have to get a huge amount of programs set up, and find blasted serial numbers, etc. What a pain. But my little Alien is glowing with blue stripes sitting next to my chair (wouldn't fit into the hutch, this thing is huge) and extremely quiet. Air blows out the front and back, nice and cool. Box arrived in mint condition, very happy with UPS. Sigh of relief!
Reminder- Dell Alienware Area-51 computer with an Intel i7 Six Core, 32 GB of RAM, a GTX 970 (1664 CUDA cores) with 4GB RAM on the video card (going 6 was $1000 more, forget it) It has a 2TB harddrive.
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K (6-cores, 15MB Cache, Overclocked up to 3.8 GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
Congrats on the new system Novica! It will be a dream compared to the laptop, I have to hurry up and decide exactly what I want for my new system. I've been doing much research and started a thread in the commons about what specs I was looking for, lots of great answers and also found a fantastic youtube channel of Carey Holzman who has been a technician for over 20 years and has built thousands of computers. He shows many different builds and give lots of tips, so I think I will take the plunge and build mine even though its been about 12 years since the last build I did.
Enjoy the new machine :)
That 2TB drive should hold you for about, oh..., six months or so!
LOL I have TBs of external hard drives to bail me out!
Kharma, I've been loving that thread, it's interesting to see which way you're gonna go. You have the talent to build your own, I don't! (And no inclination to do it either. I'm SO non-technical and no patience.
My sons are in there playing with the pulsating and changing lights, I'm like "Get out of my chair...now!" (They're in their 20's and laughing at the glowing alien head.) The first time I left a page and X'd out and went to my opening screen, it startled me to see a huge alien head staring at me! (I had one of my renders on my laptop.) Gotta change that, for sure. Or maybe not. I named him George.
One thing to mention- if you buy an already put together desktop computer, do the windows update before you attempt to install any adobe creative cloud programs, like Photoshop. It was about 80% loaded then errored, saying to install the latest windows blah blah blah. Had me restart the computer, the updates kicked in, and whoosh, no problem.
OMGosh, did my first DIM downloads and 3D Universe's Toon Croc of 49kb was a blink and about 4 seconds, the Chicken of 7.1 MB was 9 seconds, the Croc of 9.8 MB was about 11 seconds! So it was doing slightly less than a MB per second. This is going to be nice getting used to the speed. I went back to the laptop after uninstalling those to test it and compare (at the same time of the night) and the 4 second one took 35 seconds on my laptop, the 7.1 MB of 9 seconds took about 50 seconds. This is at 12:50 a.m. in the morning, not prime time, but a very nice download rate regardless.
why would the download speed be so different - using Dim
Everything is overall faster, my laptop was rather a dinosaur. It should have had "osaurus" at the end of the model number.
I did the benchmark test. It's fun comparing what others are doing and it gives everyone an idea of what to look for when shopping around. Some folks are doing the renders in under four minutes, wow! (Mine was slightly over 5 minutes, I'm very happy!)