Hey all,
I am looking a good deal on a new desktop for work, I've had a search and so far the M900 Mini Tower looks like the best bet so far at $1400 with the 16GB RAM, 8260 wifi card, second serial port and 500GB HDD, SSD options look to be poorly priced so that would be bought elsewhere. I would also have to upgrade Home to Pro.
Link http://www3.lenovo.com/au/en/deals/current-offers/desktop-de…
Budget is $1500, already have the monitors, keyboard, mouse etc.
PC will be used for software development, running VM's, designing PCBs (Specs requirement from Altium: NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 640 series or AMD® Radeon® HD 7770, 1024MB (or more) graphics card or better, supporting DirectX 9.0c and Shader model 3 (or later)).
What I am looking for in terms of specs:
i7-6700 or better, a 6 core would be nice but I haven't seen anything in the price range with the option.
256GB SSD or bigger, this can be purchased separately, otherwise any size HDD is ok, currently using a Samsung 850 Pro so something or similar or better spec
16GB RAM or greater
GFX card that meets the above, I have 2x monitors with VGA and HDMI only so 2x HDMI or DP would be useful
Serial port would be nice to have
WiFi/Bluetooth 4.1 would be nice to have
2x LAN would also be nice to have
I have always built my desktops so I don't really know the best go to's in terms of best bang for the buck, whether this be OEM or somewhere like mwave and their custom builds. Either is ok but building isn't an option, need a warranty that we can get support with rather than having to diagnose and return individual parts.
Even if no specific recommendations but sites/shops to use would also be helpful - I've looked at Dell, Lenovo, mwave, msy and JW computers so far.
Looking over at Dell's site, their gaming section has Alienware Aurora's
http://www.dell.com/au/p/alienware-aurora-r5-desktop/pd
Alienware Aurora
$1.5K
gets you i7-6700
16GB of RAM
Windows 10 Home (+$100 Extra for the Pro upgrade)
2TB 7200 rpm Hard Drive
Tray load DVD Drive (Reads and Writes to DVD/CD)
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 950 with 2GB GDDR5
1 year onsite warranty
Doesn't appear to have serial port, but for an extra $50 bucks you can buy an RS232 Serial port add-in card that gives you two ports. https://www.mwave.com.au/product/startech-2-port-pci-rs232-s…
this works out to $1650 which does blow your budget, but the GTX 950 it offers is much newer / faster than the GT 720, there is two times the RAM and there is two times the storage over the M900 base config.