Sachys: Well, you've all given me plenty to chew over and relate to the Yogmeister. I didn't expect a definitive answer, but I think
yours Sachys: ...is the best all-round advice from my point of view. Thanks everyone will let you know what happens down the road - or return with more specific know-how needed.
I don't want to come off too harsh. a 970 is a solid card. if you don't have a card now, then it's pretty decent. and I'd say it would have some legs to it. but you never know. the new cards drop next year. but it could be later next year. and the cheaper variants always come out months later after the expensive top end and still somewhat expensive higher mid-range launch. though last time they launched with the cheaper card so I don't know. you could always put together a nice system and just stick in a 750ti. with intent to replace it with one of the newer cards. like I said, 600GBP (920 USD 1210 CAD) should get you something decent.
look here
http://techreport.com/review/29012/the-tech-report-system-guide-september-2015-edition/8 you can see that you can start to get something decent together for 600GBP. so I don't want to come off too negative. there's never really a "perfect" time to buy because they're smart about shit and they always try to angle stuff to make it back somehow. but yeah, there are better times than others. pc is rough imo. rougher than it needs to be without dumping money on it.
in consoles the initial buy in is easy and cheap but then you pay $60 a game and you can't mod or anything and have no freedom relative to pc. it's like razor and blade stuff. but on the pc the initial buy-in is the barrier and then you get access to the lovely steam and humble bundle and gog world.
Leonard03: This was an interesting read as I'm looking to buy a new PC too. I just found
this on the Canadian newegg site (comes out to about 500 USD). It seems... too good of a deal to be true.
Anybody have thoughts on this?
a lot of ram. a nice cpu. cpu is probably stock cooler, but that doesn't matter really. the one problem is that it says "gtx 745 4gb". I don't know what the fuck that is. the 750ti is a 1-2gb card and it's a lower end thing. this "gtx 745" sounds like a prebuilt gimp card. here check this out
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2161092/nvidia-geforce-745-gtx-4gb-info.html specifically, dlcj21. he says he contacted dell. it's apparently a custom job for dell. the 4gb is not GDDR5 but DDR3. the card's tdp is 50 watts. it likely sucks shit. like really bad. like witcher 3 on medium at 16fps at 1080p bad. you'll need a new gpu. but that's not horrible, cause that's a pretty fucking nice deal on the rest of it. but that PSU, 460W, means that you're now forced down to lower end cards. I'm not sure you can run a 970 comfortably with anything less than a 500W. nvidia has released 960 and 950 but I haven't paid too much attention. a 460W PSU can run lower middle range gpus of last year or so but as of the launch of the 290 and the 970, those gpus (7870 [like ps4], 7850, 7950, 770? 760?) are now lower end than they were. if the case can fit your card that you must replace the stock one with, and your 460W PSU can handle the card you put in, or your new PSU can fit into your budget with the box and the card, and that PSU fits in that case, then it seems alright to me. does not say motherboard. possible the motherboard is micro-atx, which means limited pcie slots after that one big x16 for the gpu. but these days, people generally don't add other stuff besides a gpu. if probably has at least 1 free SATA 6gbps slot so you could fit an ssd in there.