new tower

I have two print outs from Micro Center with the specs for two different towers. These are new pre built.

I know it depends on what I want but I am asking if someone can help me go over the specs and prices.

The $900 has an integrated graphics card which I am unsure about.

I was hoping for i5 and put the money in a dedicated card but don't really know.

Thee is a 3 year warranty for $169 and a standard 1 year for both.

If you would like to help I will send the specs as  attachments.

Thank you

Hello Peter1,

Send the attachments for us and we will take a look, can you also let us know what the main use of the computer will be.

Hi Phil

After a lot of work I concluded to do one of two things;

1-have Micro center build my PC which will be more costly b/c I will be selective about parts(posting them here for review)

2- buy a tower already built. I have attachments with the specs but this forum says hey are too large to upload.

I wanted a new one now so I could use a VM which I cannot now do but decided to wait as this machine runs well even though it is old.

Micro Center Power Spec G431 and B741 if you are interested.

Knowing one can buy a bad light bulb or spark plug etc all is chancy. I am not skilled enough to build my own and parts no would cost more then if they did it.

Thank you for replying

Hello Peter,

Do you have links to the specs at Micro Center.

An alternative suggestion for you if you have a reputable local tech or tech store, ask them what they would charge for putting a build together for you, purchase your own individual parts then have them do the build, we can help you here with putting a parts list together, couple of links here and here

Logical Increments will give you an idea of what you will get within your price range and PCPartPicker will let you experiment with parts list/s, you mention wanting an i5 so that would be your first component on the list, then an appropriate motherboard, your RAM, GPU etc.

I will see what sort of parts list that I can come up with for around $900, we will have to factor in the cost of a Windows OS one way or another.

You are welcome btw 

http://www.microcenter.com/                        I buy Windows Pro and they charge $150 to assemble a PC.

I will send attachments in pairs as they are too big when 3 are sent.

9 refers to the 900 build and 12 refers to the 1200$ build. 1,2,3 refer to the sequence of pages per build.

I will be back with more.

BTW, I do not do gaming but did want to build a VM not using hyper-v.

Virtual Box or free VMware would be good. My machine does not support  virtualization and is about 7 years old..

I'll be back with more attachments.

I see only 2 attachments but sent 6.

I will work on that. I was told getting parts on my own would cost more than they can get the parts.

This should be the last of the 6.

This is not the only builds. These re 2 of the ready built machines in the store. They are not the ones I exclusively want but are two examples of what I saw ready made in the store. I am using this store as it has good reviews and is down the street from me.

I cannot seem to get the #3 file through and it is not large.

No worries, take a look at the parts list that I put together for you here

Have included Windows 10 and an SSD in the build which has taken the budget up to $1008.35.

NB: Cant seem to add an optical drive for some reason, expect to pay around $15 for one of these.

Edit to add: Almost a thousand $ without any add on GPU and most likely a cheap and nasty power supply, not for me, the $1300 build looks better but would want a better case and a quality brand Gold efficiency rated PSU for that price.

I wished for Windows Pro, and would need  a DVD read write.

Also Virtual Box could run on 250 GB SSD but 500 is recommended, I believe.

There are many configurations out there and I am copying yours down for reference, particularly the compatibility.

Thank you for your work.                                         

You are welcome, you have a better idea of what you need than I do so hopefully the links provided will help you get the best prices.

Also Virtual Box could run on 250 GB SSD but 500 is recommended, I believe.

 

Virtual Box system requirements

I read that page and t seems  that VB needs 512 MB RAM and 10 GB storage. I found no other specs. Is this true and is there something I missed?

you will need at least 512 MB of RAM (but probably more, and the more the better). Basically, you will need whatever your host operating system needs to run comfortably, plus the amount that the guest operating system needs. So, if you want to run Windows 8.1 on Windows 7, you probably won't enjoy the experience much with less than 2 GB of RAM. Check the minimum RAM requirements of the guest operating system, they often will refuse to install if it is given less. Sometimes it malfunctions instead. So you'll need that for the guest alone, plus the memory your operating system normally needs.

 

8GB of RAM will be fine, please note that for RAM to work in dual channel mode you need to have two matching sticks, that is why I included 2 Xs 4GB sticks, if you were to use a single 8GB stick of RAM it would only work in single channel which is only 50% of the speed that is capable of (1333MHz as opposed to 2666MHz).

Hard disk space. While VirtualBox itself is very lean (a typical installation will only need about 30 MB of hard disk space), the virtual machines will require fairly huge files on disk to represent their own hard disk storage. So, to install Windows 8, for example, you will need a file that will easily grow to several 10 GB in size.

 

"Several 10 GB in size" what sort of description is that, why not 70GBs or am I missing something