Wondering what laptop or desktop to buy? Stop here and take a look for basic information.

[DZCreeper]

First off, there is a great deal that cheap computers can these days. You can build or buy a technically functional machine for around $300 US plus shipping. There won't be gobs of memory, a video card, a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, or even a copy of Windows. This equates to low but acceptable performance, forget playing anything but old games. FTB is playable, but on low settings.

For this reason, having a high budget will most likely save you money in the long run. By spending more now, you get more performance out of your new hardware so you won't be upgrading as often.

For desktops I suggest a budget of around $800 to $1000 or $1350 if you need a screen, keyboard, mouse, and maybe a wireless adapter. If your budget is $400 US or under I suggest getting something prebuilt. If its $500 or over, I suggest buying pieces and building your own. The benefits of doing this include saving money, better warranties, and learning the skills needed to troubleshoot any future hardware problems which can save even more money.

For help deciding on parts, Logical Increments is a good place to start. Feel free to tweak the parts to suit your needs or ask questions.
http://www.logicalincrements.com/


For laptops I suggest a budget of $1400. While this may seem expensive, for that amount of money you usually get a quality built machine that performs decently. Not to mention, a laptop has a screen, keyboard, and trackpad built in. An important note about laptops is portability. Portability comes at the costs of weight and/or performance. If you want to have desktop like performance, expect to pay about 1.5 times more and be slightly less comfortable carrying it under your shoulder.

I will update this post as questions come in. Another source of great information is here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/wiki/partsguide

 

[Vauthil]

Moved to General Discussion.

 

[Hoho]

It would help if you'd mention that the amount of cores and clock speed should NEVER be directly compared between CPUs (and GPUs) from different manufacturers or generations.

The amount of vram on graphics card will be significantly more important as soon as games targeted for next generation of consoles start appearing on PCs. IIRC the next battlefield (or some other random FPS, can't remember) had recommended size of 3GB.

Comparing PSUs with just the output in watts is relatively useless. There are some models out there that mathematically have 650W output but will literally explode if you try to pull over 400W out of it. If you really want a single metric to compare them going by weight gives more information than just the theoretical peak output that nearly all manufacturers put on the boxes of them.[DOUBLEPOST=1379413960][/DOUBLEPOST]

For this reason, having a high budget will most likely save you money in the long run. By spending more now, you get more performance out of your new hardware so you won't be upgrading as often.

Then again spending 1k on GPUs every 3 years will generally be give you worse result than spending 300 every year (and selling the old one). Only thing is for the first year or so you'll have somewhat better speed but the more frequently upgraded thing will surpass it in a couple of years, not to mention getting new features.