Help me help a friend...

[M0710NM4N]

Have a buddy who is in the market for a new PC.. right now he is looking at these 2 items:

http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_00320725000P?prdNo=7&bloclalalalalockType=G32

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1101394&CatId=4910

I think he can do better if he got parts and built his own... but Im not up to date on whats out there so hoped some people be able to narrow down all the parts needed for a decent build (or if they felt either of these 2 are good enough)... his max spending amount which needs to include monitor and windows 7 is somewhere between $900 - $1200 and this would be mostly for gaming... ala Battlefield 3.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[tiraides]

It will be hard to convince your friend to go with a DIY build if he hasn't built one before and he's very price conscious. The following is an "average" build that we normally recommend for gaming:

$305 - Intel Core i5 2500K and Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM combo deal
$135 - MSI P67A-G45 (B3)
$30 - Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
$44 - G.Skill Value Series F3-10666CL9D-8GBNT 2x4GB DDR3 1333 kit
$60 - Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB SATA 3Gb/s HDD
$20 - Samsung SH-222AB SATA DVD burner
$280 - XFX HD-695X-CDFC Radeon HD 6950 2GB
$110 - Corsair TX750 V2 750W PSU
$60 - Lian Li Lancool PC-K58
$150 - Acer G245HQAbd 23.6" 1920x1080 monitor
=====
$1194 - Subtotal (not including shipping, taxes, or rebates)

The above price doesn't include the costs of a keyboard, mouse, or speakers nor does it factor in any taxes (if you live in a place where NewEgg charges any sales tax), shipping charges (ditto), or mail-in rebates (since you aren't able to cash them in during checkout, among other reasons). Since it's (much) closer to the $1200 limit than the $900 limit, you will have to explain the advantages that the above build has over the two that your friend is considering. Long story short, my build has:

-- better quality parts (there are a few parts in each of those prebuilts that we don't normally recommend);
-- the ability to overclock the processor (if you or your friend is in to that);
-- 8GB of DDR3 memory;
-- a high-end video card factored in;
-- a large 1920x1080 monitor; and
-- plenty of room (in the case and on the motherboard) for future upgrades.

If your friend balks at the price, remind him that a decent 23 to 24 inch monitor can cost upwards of $200 an a copy of Windows 7 costs at least $100. And while the video card, at nearly $300, is the most expensive part of this machine, you need something of that caliber to play games like Battlefield 3 with good frame rates.

 

[E4g1e]

For the most part, I agree with tiraides. Both of those builds your buddy is looking at have several substandard parts, especially the shitty PSUs that either are inadequate to power the parts or cannot provide anywhere close to their advertised wattage ratings (for example, both of those PSUs in those systems can barely provide even 60% of their advertised wattages - the "350W" unit in one of those systems is effectively only a 200W unit while the "585W" unit in another can realistically deliver only 300W). Plus, both of those systems lack SATA 6.0 Gbps and USB 3.0 capabilities and require him to discard both sticks of RAM just to add more RAM (their motherboards have only two DIMM slots thanks to their decision to use the budget H61 chipset rather than the more feature-laden H67 chipset). That practically limits their cost-effective RAM capacity to only 8GB maximum (8GB unbuffered non-ECC DIMMs are available but one single 8GB DIMM currently costs four times more than any pair of 4GB DIMMs). And neither system comes with a discrete GPU at all; they rely entirely on the CPUs' integrated graphics that are about as slow as the slowest (cheapest) of today's discrete GPUs. The games that he's planning to play demand a much higher-end GPU than any of the onboard or cheap solutions.