My laptop (non-gaming) finally croaked, so I'm in the market for a gaming PC. I know very little about gaming PC's, having been a console gamer my whole life. Are there any decent pre-built desktops out there? CyberPower always shows up as being decent. I'm also interested in HP's Omen series. I don't have a huge budget, maybe $800-$1000 for a desktop.

Any thoughts?

I don't actually know. For a few reasons: I don't care that much about performance and gaming anymore (I mean, I still prefer a dedicated GPU to some integrated thing, at least on my main box, and I do drool over powerful hardware that I really know I won't be able to use, but that's just it, I know I don't actually have use for it), I enjoy putting my own machine together, and I don't trust big-name companies to make machines that are actually good for anything more than a web browser and an office suite.

However, I remembered that the late TotalBuiscuit made a video long ago (half a year? a year? a year and a half? I don't know) when he had just acquired his most recent machine, and that instead of building it himself and messing about when stuff didn't work the first time, he called upon the services of Maingear to do the job and send him a fully working machine. Since I trust his decision on that front, I now forward that as a recommendation to you.

Yes,
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/
Probably uk only, but they were great, built it all, really happy. Had an issue and they shipped replacement parts out immediately. Would highly recommend them and will use them again myself.

Read some of these guides: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/buying-guides/
Then find a store to assemble your PC for you.

And btw. you should give us more information about what you want to do with your "gaming PC". There's no such thing as "gaming" in general.

Personally, I generally just buy a barebones kit from Tigerdirect or similar and put it together myself. Desktop computers today are trivial to put together as most of it is color coded.

The only thing that's at all tricky is just understanding what goobins you want to use. And even that isn't too bad if you don't mind doing a little research.

ibuypower.com and cyberpowerpc.com are both pretty reliable. I got my PC from ibuypower years ago because it was cheaper overall to let them build it than to buy the parts separately. Not always the case, but with that particular superbowl sale it was.

I still use ibuypower to sort of template lists of compatible PC parts for building out my own machines.

Speaking from experience I would avoid ASUS

It's likely outside of your price rage but look at Puget Systems for something in the future.

If you area willing to save just a FEW more pennies I would really recommend DELL for stuff like that.

They have solid support and the parts they use seem to hold up over time fairly well to custom off the shelf parts. This pc I posted is pretty good for the price if you do not want to go custom on your own and want pre built with a bang.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-inspiron-desktop-intel-core-i7-16gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-1tb-hard-drive-256gb-solid-state-drive-recon-blue-with-clear-panel-and-blue-lighting/6265639.p?skuId=6265639


Benchmark of the system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXeGzhdSxaU

I've sort of been interested in getting a new desktop PC (though I don't think it's time yet).

My needs are as follows:
* Target game: Bard's Tale 4. This is the game I want to be able to play, and it isn't likely that I'll want games more demanding than that.
* Will be using Linux, and do not want to use proprietary graphics cards.
* I want to avoid NVIDIA cards, as that company does not provide open source drivers for their graphics cards. (Treat them as having negative value; a PC with an NVIDIA GPU is less valuable to me than an otherwise comparable PC with only integrated graphics.)
* Should not have worse specs than what I have now (16GB RAM, i5 4670 CPU).
* Would like the computer to be capable of VGA passthrough (assigning a GPU to a virtual machine, allowing gaming in the VM).
* Would also like it to run quietly, especially while idle.

Also, I remember years ago when I could easily customize prebuilt computers from the major brands (like Dell and HP); what happened to that? How much does this typically cost?

I've literally never had that happen to me in any of the builds I've done. And certainly not when I'm using a bare bones kit.

I'd usually suggest building your own PCs, but so far I've had two pre-built laptops, one from ASUS (ROG) and the other from MSI.

I bought my ASUS laptop back in 2012 and since it left the store it never gave me any trouble. It would run my games smoothly, the components didn't fail me at any point and it was an overall good experience. Since my ASUS was almost seven years old, I decided to finally change it for a new laptop. I'd recommend ASUS though because of their durability; as that thing was sturdy and lasted a while with me without issues at all (other than the usual performance drop due to time). It didn't come with much bloatware or anything, that laptop was ready to go from the start and it worked beautifully. The coolers did one hell of a job too, and I'd constantly play high-end games without the temperature going up to uncomfortable levels for the hardware.

I got a MSI laptop last year, and it had a rough start. The moment I booted it on, and installed all the updates and drivers, one of the software programs that came with the laptop so I could customize the keyboard lighting started acting up; to make it even worse the keyboard was also fishy and at times even non-responsive. I ended up calling MSI support and tried everything, but nothing fixed the issue, because the company that developed their keyboard program was not even a subsidiary but a completely different company. I ended up sending the laptop back so they could send me a new one, which they did (it took over two weeks but it got here). The new one didn't have the same issues, so the first one was probably defective or poorly set up. Now one thing that I must say is that MSI is full of bloatware such as their own settings/monitoring software which can be glitchy, or a bunch of other third party stuff that your PC can run fine without, that is definitely my biggest gripe with MSI pre-built computers, it's filled with so many useless programs. Something that also upsets me about my MSI laptop is that it gets hot, even when I put the cooler on maximum settings on the Dragon Center; and if I put it on automatic it doesn't seem to follow what it needs to do. Other than those things, my MSI has been running fine and I feel like it isn't a bad brand, it's technically a new computer so I definitely need more time to see it it pays, but so far I'm enjoying it and it runs my games very well.

I'd reccomend those two brands. I like how MSI just changed mine once it was defective, definitely a big point to them, and I like how sturdy and durable ASUS computers tend to be.

I'm comfortable with Dell. I find them sturdy, lasting, modulable. I know which each Dell that I'll be safe for many years, and that I can easily replace a component if my tech falls too far behind.