Hey guys, sorry for the delay, but Monday's been a bigger bear than usual at the bank. Anyway, here's some opinions/information for those of you interested in buying a new PC.
@BigJim®, you can go with an HP Pavilion, but there ARE caveats. The issue with HP or Dell (and I worked for Compaq back when we got bought out by HP, so I'm familiar with how they do things) is non-standard parts. The stats you get on one of their units are usually pretty good for the components listed, and you get a nice amount of power for the dollars paid. However, the way they get to those lower prices is by streamlining the components for fewer bits/shared bits/bits that are designed to work specifically together. This means an HP power supply, and a HP motherboard, and an HP cooling solution, etc. etc. etc. So, if you want your computer to be a commodity usage item that you'll never open, never want to upgrade, and never consider repairing, then it's OK - go for it. My mother did when she bought her last PC, and told me "If it breaks I'll buy another one". And for that type of user it's a good buy - there's nothing wrong with their durability or build quality, you're just shoe-horned into doing it "their" way. Laptops have the same issues - they can be great out of the box, but death on repairs and upgrades.
Smaller firms like the Lyte Tech units we were talking about earlier in this thread instead use stock parts like any user who wants to build their own unit would - straight off of the shelf. This usually will get you a slightly higher price per component, but a greater control over getting exactly what you want, and a hell of a lot easier upgrade or repair path in case that ever becomes a necessity. And it does happen - I'm currently considering a memory upgrade for my main system, as a game program I'm getting into now could use the extra space, and I run a few too many tabs in Chrome for my own good... I tend to recommend this sort of system instead of HP or Dell for most users if they don't want to build their own, but do have the drawback of not having that slightly higher price, and working with companies that you may not know all that much about.
@cap'n grunge, I'm interested in which components Lyte was using that were sufficiently out of date to cause an issue - I didn't dig that deeply, but they seemed pretty current from what I looked at. They seemed like an OK builder to me - or I can also suggest SkyTech, I've had a few friends buy from them and get good results.
You said your big question was size/brand on CPU and GPU? Well, let's start with CPU. For most of the last decade and a half, Intel was consistently the better choice for a gaming rig - faster cores, and most of the software out there didn't take advantage of additional cores very well, so even if AMD ran more of them, there wasn't a significant advantage. Ryzen, however changed all that. The Zen architecture really enabled better sharing of resources like internal cache between cores, just as software authors were starting to enable better use of those cores, and while Intel rested on their laurels AMD smoked right past them to be the better choice over the last 3-4 years. This is especially true of the 3000 and later series of chips, where AMD had added PCIe version 4 capability, allowing for faster access to things like storage drives. For me right now I'm all in with AMD and Ryzen chips. The good news is that the 3000 series Ryzen chips are still top notch, and you can get good deals on them without paying top dollar for the newer 5000 or later options. I'm currently rocking 3700x's in both my and Mrs. R's computers, and they're awesome.
Now, after going on about which chips are the greatest, let me note that these days the CPU is probably less important to a GAMING rig than the GPU is. Not completely irrelevant, but not what's going to make a gaming PC sing. Raw CPU power is more important for content creators, video editing, that sort of thing. A good graphics card with a good GPU will kick that old frames per second count up there and make your games look all that much better. And the more you're into fast movement, first person shooters, and games with eye candy, the more it matters. I used to be a Radeon user, but my most recent builds have shifted to Nvidia cards, as they seem to have less compatibility issues (at least with the programs and games I run). With the advent of the Steam gaming download service, it seems like Steam standardized to the Nvidia cards for the programs they support, so I'm recommending going that direction until/unless Radeon can catch up. Although with the shortages out there right now, it may be more of a "I'll take what I can get" option, so be forewarned.
As far as how powerful a graphics card you need, well, here I like to go by the "what games do you like to run" question. You can go nuts buying super expensive cards, but if your most demanding game is Fortnight, you definitely hit a point of diminishing returns. We're on a Fantasy Football site, so let's build this answer in draft tiers. Your baseline starting point for a gaming unit would be a RTX1650/RTX1660/RX5500, and would be fine for older games or games that don't require the whole screen to be rebuild constantly - so Diablo style overhead games, Civilization strategy games, that sort of thing, all good (this is my tier, I have RTX1660s). You can also run lighter 1st person shooters here, so Fortnight probably falls in the upper end of this category - the processor is fine, but might need more video memory, say at least a 6 GB rather than a 4 GB card, or a GTX1660Ti. The next tier would be the RTX2060/RTX2070/RTX3050/RTX3060/RX6600 range, which is perfect for more impressive first person shooters and higher eye candy RPG options - Elden Ring, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarok, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, etc. Finally, anything over the RTX3060Ti or the RX6700XT are like 1st round RB selections - awesome, but probably way way overpriced unless you're REALLY serious about your gaming.
Whew! Mrs. R thinks I can't answer a computer question without writing a novel - she may be right...
