StudlyCaps wrote:
My own PC I built myself about 3 months ago, about $1800, similar spec'd off the shelf looks about $3000. I'd say that's enough of a difference to justify the effort.
Hmmn, I suspect that the PC market in Australia is significantly different from that in Germany; it certainly is from that in the US. $1375USD for still seems pricey for a component build to me, unless it included
all new equipment including a large-ish monitor.
Last year and early this year (starting around June 2016 and dragging on until almost this past June), I was spec'ing a few different separate PCs, two high-end systems for a friend and a low-end one for myself which he was going to cover in exchange for doing the research (long story). I looked at several configurations for component builds as well as custom builds from a number of customizers such as Falcon NW.
The high end systems were a video editing system for indy filmmaking, and a VR rig for working on designing and testing Oculus Rift programs. It started out with the idea of a sort of mega-build, a very-small-footprint and physically light desktop system that could do both jobs and which he could move between two different offices in different cities over 300 miles apart. After spending a lot of time frustratingly working on this (as much as I am able to work on anything, so... an hour or two a week?), I convinced him that the combination of specs was not going to fit, and that he needed to have two different systems, one in each office (though he still wanted it to be physically small for some good reasons that aren't really relevant here) each rigged for a specific purpose but capable of handling the others' work load in a pinch.
These were some hefty systems, with one build calling for four 8TiB HDDs, two 1TB SSDs, and a pair of top-line nVidia-GPU video cards (at least 1080Ti, preferably Titan X). It topped out at around $4500 US, not counting the high-end supersized 4K monitors he wanted (which I was also researching. for him - I was being a bit of a tool).
The other was way on the other end of the spectrum, with a $500 US hard price limit. Despite this, I managed to spec a previous-gen 8-core AMD system with 16GB DDR2 RAM, a 1TB HDD, a nice but not great AMD-based video card, and a 23" monitor.
Despite this, I am pretty sure that if I were willing to put up with a cheap Dell (stripping out the bundled shovelware and installing Linux as the base system with Windows 10 in virtualization), I could have gotten it for $400 US.