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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 30th Oct 2013 at 12:17 AM
Default Help picking out a Desktop (yes another one of those)
Yes another one of these, I'm very sorry. However I feel it's appropriate and would greatly appreciate any advice/help. My friend is a bro and is also helping me, but I thought it would be a good idea to specifically ask simmers for suggestions due to the sensitive nature of the sims.

It's finally time to replace my desktop, currently this: http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/si...ette.cachetoken with a GeForce 9500 GT installed. It's been steadily falling into despair over the past year or so and I gave up on playing TS3, which I miss greatly. Besides that, many of my computer functions are just gradually failing, so I definitely need to replace and not upgrade my computer.

I live in the US as a home-business owner, with only decent knowledge of computers. I can not build my own, although I may be able to do some minor assembly. My budget will be around 1.5kish, I technically have a budget of 2k but I don't really want to spend that much. I have monitors, a keyboard and mouse already. My monitors: http://www.amazon.com/HP-2010i-20-I...eywords=hp2010i I plan to purchase W7 for my system regardless, so that doesn't need to be included in the budget either.

My goal is to play TS3 with all expansions and much CC installed at good graphic settings with high FPS. My current FPS on my current build is anywhere from 8-15 iirc. I also would like to play other games, such as Bioshock Infinite, The Sims 4, Batman, etc. I would also like to do video capture if possible within the budget (the last one isn't required if it's not possible, I assume I could upgrade later for that). I use my computer for other normal things such as photo editing, internet, etc.

I'm planning to wait for Black Friday in hopes of snagging a good deal on my build.

Thank you anyone for your help, I appreciate it.
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Scholar
#3 Old 30th Oct 2013 at 2:17 PM
I don't recommend Cyberpower. I haven't read anything good about them and you could go with an i5 instead of an i7. If you get a new GTX (not GT) Nvidia card they can do video capture using the GPU instead of the CPU. From those who have tested it so far, they've said there's no noticeable drop in FPS, it's free and the quality is good. It does have the limitation of being able to record only 20min of footage per file.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#4 Old 30th Oct 2013 at 3:27 PM
Yeah, after my room mate's issue with MSI (broke 3 times in 1 year) I'm wary with brands I'm not familiar with. I've basically had HPs all my life, so I'm not familiar with these newer brands. Thank you for the info on the capture, I guess the 20m limitation isn't really a problem if it resolves FPS issues. I rather just keep making new files than have a constant frame drop.

The main reason I didn't want to build my own computer is I ran into a lot of problems trying to inspect and replace parts in my HP when it started going bad, especially the power supply. I've been pretty much scared away from it with warnings from people about breaking my computer by touching the wrong things. Although, after doing some research and watching instructional videos I am considering it now.

Thank you Katu for the helpful links!
Scholar
#5 Old 30th Oct 2013 at 4:17 PM
If you want you can just pick parts (or we can help you pick parts) online at NCIX.com and they can assemble it for you, for a $50ish fee. We had some other users do that here and they were happy, even if the service was a bit slow.
 
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