Hey everyone,

I'm going to buy a new desktop PC at the end of this year (like around late November) and I've been looking at buying a custom built PC instead of building one. I've been particularly looking at mid towers from Origin PC. While I fully understand that the majority of PC gamers will yell from the rooftops to build your own PC and documentation for doing so has improved in recent years I do not want to do that for a variety of my own reasons.

I want an enthusiast, high end rig. I want something that will last a long time, and I also want to game in 4K, at a consistent 60 FPS if possible. We'll see how the 1080 does with that. I'm not particularly interested in VR but if it can run it that's fine. I also want a large amount of storage because I prefer to store music and games locally.

That said, are buying PCs from custom shops the next best thing to building one? How much would you be willing to pay for a custom built PC?

If you can get a PC with an i7, a 1080, and an SSD for less than the starting price of the top tier MacBook Pro, which is $2500, that doesn't seem like a terrible deal to me. That said, building one is a good experience, and you know how it's all put together too, should you want to upgrade anything in the future. And you can save a lot of money.

There is nothing wrong with getting a costum built PC except that you will of course pay a bit extra compared to building yourself and you cannot choose every part yourself. So you might end up getting 90% of the performance for 120% of the price but if you don't enjoy reading about the latest motherboards and GPUs and putting it all together then it might be an option. Just make sure you get the latest things. Some costom PC builders like to use last gen parts to clear out stock so make sure if you buy it in november it is a 1080 or whatever AMDs high end card will be and not a 980 or Titan X which will be old by then since they are replaced this summer.

Yeah. I would be one of the many people to say "build it yourself" for various reasons. But, doing my best to set my bias aside, if I either didn't know or care about building a PC, I would probably buy a pre-built custom system from higher tier vendors like Origin PC, Puget Systems, or NCIX for, at most, a hundred dollars more than what I would pay for building it myself putting a parts list at Newegg and Amazon. So at least looking at a PC from Origin is better than a pre-built from HP, Lenovo, Dell/Alienware and so on, and much more reliable than buying from CyberPowerPC and iBuyPower.

Just a heads up, this definitely isn't possible with a 980Ti, so personally I'm really dubious it will be on a 1080. At the very least I can't imagine it running brand new releases on maxed out settings at 4k yet.

Other boutiques to check out are Maingear and Digital Storm.

If you want a little more control on the parts they are picking, check out avadirect.

To elaborate a little more, I am well aware that if I buy a custom PC from a boutique shop instead of building it myself I will be paying a decent amount more to cover labor and build costs. I've browsed around and looked at builds from Origin, Digital Storm, Falcon Northwest, Xidax, and Maingear, to name a few. I've also looked at builds from pc part picker and Maximum PC for building one yourself. I am a PC gamer, though my last PC was a gaming laptop (I was in college back then) and it's now 5 years old and pretty much dead in the water. So my needs and wants have since changed.

Additionally, my dad is an IT professional and has been in the field for gosh, about 30 years now. So I've grown up around PCs and have a general knowledge about them, parts, and troubleshooting from osmosis. However, I've never built my own PC before, and my dad hasn't built any PCs since the 90's. If I build, I'm largely on my own, and I am admittedly leery and concerned about that. While building PCs has become easier it isn't an exact science, and stuff may just not work the way it is intended to, if at all. If you have a niche problem the internet will be less likely to have your answer. So I feel that paying more for the piece of mind that everything is considered, optimized, and configured to work correctly from the start is worth it to me, at least this time. I may build a PC myself in the future.

I have been watching news on general part upgrades, and this is obviously a big year for that. Again, I am going to wait until November so I can save up and get the best parts available from this entire year. I want to get an SLI setup, and I will at least be buying two 1080s. I think that Nvidia will make a 1080ti this fall, but that is pure personal speculation on my part right now. I've also been watching motherboards and CPU, and generally looking at what people rate highly on part lists and what people like.

What is the general consensus on hybrid hard drives? I know that they are basically high capacity SSDs and traditional drives, but do people like them? Are they really any good long term?

@steeltooth493: I bought a hybrid 1TB drive for my spare PC last year. It boots up quicker than any conventional mech drive I've owned but nowhere near as fast as an SSD. In day-to-day use it's fine but I'm not seeing anything noticeably better than the WD Black drive I have,

SSDs are pretty cheap now so I'd recommend getting one for Windows duties, even if it's only 120-250GB, plus a mech drive for storage.

Hybrid drives are going away.

SSDs are becoming fairly cheap, so if you can afford it get a big ssd and enjoy the speed.

The above is the headiest bit, because 4K @ 60+ fps will be a fairly high-end for sure. But , you seem to know that already. Origin is a fine company, but as other have said there are many boutique bands to choose from that all have nice system if you have the money.

@dave_tacitus: I did some browsing and it would be less expensive for me to purchase a hybrid drive than it would be for me to pick up a mechanical one, at least on Origin. Wouldn't you want to have an SSD large enough that you could also store games on it? How does using an SSD for your OS primary drive and a mechanical drive work together? I know a lot of people do it, but I've not used them in tandem like that myself before, aside from external SSD drives.

@hmoney001 Why are hybrid drives going away?

I cant emphasize enough how much you're overstating the complications of building a machine. If you have basic ability to recognize Point A and B, you can build a PC. If you want an enthusiast rig, Custom Building is literally the definitive way to do things. Regarding Niche issues.. Windows is windows, GPUs are GPUs, and CPUs are CPUs, and if youre buying enthusiast level equipment, you're buying name brand, and youre buying parts with extensive information about them because of their value, these are things that you dont need to worry about.

That said, for 4k w/60 fps (Which, If youre building that way, maybe also consider just checking out 144hz?), youre going to be needing multiple high end GPUs in SLI to achieve that goal, along with a very enthusiast processor. Bottom line, youre probably talking a $3000 machine at minimum (And thats only taking into consideration games that can actually achieve these things, and not most poorly optimized Multiplayer games where there are massive diminishing returns on performance).

Bottom line, I couldnt disagree with you more on the "this is the year" post, since every year things improve, there really is no "this is the year" year. Especially when theres no hard evidence that the new NVIDIA cards are going to really be the 4k 60+ fps things that we're looking for. My 980TI still has certain MP games where Im falling into the 40fps range, (sad realities) Recognize whats possible, so you dont overspend for disappointment.

That said, Good luck! :D

@steeltooth493: If you're buying a hybrid drive for speed reasons then you're ultimately going to be left disappointed, especially when compared to even the cheapest SSD. If money's your primary concern then, sure, it'll be marginally faster than a conventional hard drive for some things.

Running two drives is easy - I run 4 in my main machine: 2 SSDs, 2 mechanical HDs. When you're installing Windows for the first time, point it at your SSD. When you're installing programs you don't think will benifit from the speed, point them at your mech drive, etc.

Whats the Intel chip situation like this year. Last I heard skylake was a huge jump in performance from the previous gen, is there new broadwell/kaby lake stuff a substantial jump too?

Wasn't a huge jump more like the typical intel 10-20% performance bump.