If he has his heart set on a gaming PC then that’s that! Is it just for his son 😂Sounds like useful parenting advice. But this isn't really a parenting website/forum. People come here looking for tech advise, not to be told how they should be raising their kids. Sorry.
I assisted my 11 year old grandson building his PC.
I was about to put a 5600XT, but then I saw the decent ones were almost at the same price, indeed yikes!. Both cards are good, 5600XT perform better in some games, while the 1660TI perform better on others. I would wait till next year for the price settle down, but he need one for xmas.
Hmm, ouch, yeah, that's surprising. The Pulse is a good one, though, but I'd definitely wait to see the sales. These are the highest prices I've seen for these cards.
Power supplies man, I miss being able to pick up a decent 550W 80+ Bronze PSU for $45, or less if it was on sale. Cases were nuts for a while but seem to have mostly dropped back to normal. But CPU prices are up, and Dell's lead times are currently insane if you're just trying to order, well, anything. Our latitude lead times are 30 to 45 days, monitors are 30 days, it took over 90 days to get an order of Poweredges in earlier in the year, those are back around 30 days as well. It's been nuts, the most reliable way, (even if it isnt the most desirable way) that we've found to get equipment quickly. Is to talk to the Dell rep, have them check whats in the Dell outlet thats closest to our config, order it, upgrade it if need be (ram, disk), and make sure that its ordered with the same warranty as the new equipment, the side effect is you save a few bucks, but its way more of a pain than its worth in normal times.
Agreed on CPU prices, the 2600 is a great deal though, most can OC to 4GHz on the stock cooler for $160.
Because the previous gen sucks, to be honest. A used optiplex could have a wide range of components, from trashy 3rd gen intel to core 2 duo to a 9700. The 970 is very outdated and weak in comparison to its modern counterparts.
I would not say anything from Cyberpower is better than building it yourself. Cyberpower and ibuypower are best avoided. Build quality and component selection is, more often than not, very poor.
Not even a little bit.
1 : You don't pay shipping when you pick it up at Best Buy. You also don't pay shipping or have to deal with multiple vendors when something in your DIY rig fails, nor do you have to guess and try to figure out which component didn't work right. These very forums are full of people who picked RAM that isn't QVL on their motherboard, got motherboards / PSUs that don't have the right connectors, have SSDs that don't work because the m.2 that they installed disabled a SATA port, and on and on.
I did put in the video link in my original response about a guy who specializes in how to build a low cost gaming PC. That's the other option, and he goes through many means including using refurb / retired Dell Optiplex's, mixing buy your own parts with getting parts off Ebay, using hacks to allow getting a $30 mining card based on a 1060 and outputting the graphics through the motherboard HDMI port, and so on.
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