Hey Everyone, Im in the market for a new PC. Well for the wife and me. My "budget" is around 800 as I have to keep money off to the side for monitor etc as shes been using a laptop for the last 3 years. I'll tell you what she has ATM, and what I was looking for, and what she uses it for.
Currently she is using:
Acer Aspire 5679G
15.4 inch Laptop
1366x768 resolution Display
Intel Dualcore 2.4Ghz
Geforce 240M
4 gigs of RAm
300? or 350 gig 7400 WD Black HDD/750gig External
Its about 4 ish years old. Paid like 700 for it, and the factory messed up, was supposed to come with a lower videocard but had the 240M in it.
She's starting to see signs of the videocard dying, Random blue screens, driver failure on the card. I bought myself one too and its in the closet because of the videocard dying, but mine had the 130M card instead.
Her main uses: Photoshop and I mean a lot of it I bought here a Wacom "to lazy to look up probably Bamboo or something" pad and she uses it about every day. She's really really good on a non-professional, probably could go professional if she set her mind to it way. She plays WoW, and used to play FFXI, has tried other games GW2, RIFT, and she may be interested in "that shooty game" Planetside 2(She watches me play sometimes)/ FF14 ARR. Otherwise web browsing and basic such.
What I was looking at for her was:
-Intel i5 around 3.2~3.4Ghz ~ This and the video card are outside my normal parts range usually I stick to AMD but game wise they just dont hold up now days.
-Radeon HD 7850 1 GB ~ again outside my comfort zone, usually always Nvidia here, but I'm told the Radeons have more "bang for the buck"
16 gigs of Corsair RAM 4x4 seemed the cheapest route.
Storage: 500~1tb Disk HDD and was considering 120 ish SSD for main. MAY not have a SSD just for headaches sake of her saving everything to the wrong drive and filling up the SSD on accident.
Decent Motherboard
PSU (600~650w)
Decent Case.
My Current System is:
AMD Phenom X4 3.4Ghz (OC 4.0 Ghz on aftermarket fan)
Geforce 460
8 Gigs RAM (Brand escapes me atm)
128 gig Kingston HyperX SSD, 500 Gig WD Storage
Decent low/Midrange Motherboard(Brand escapes me atm)
650w Modular PSU
Thermaltake Case
So my question to you. Where should I cut corners if any? Should I wait a few months for any exciting awesome new tech being phased in? (I dont keep up to much with the new hardware). Seen any good deals on hardware, or heard of any good deals up and coming? What would be your plan of action when building this PC, would you wait for deals or just say F it and buy everything at once? Intel or AMD? Nvidia or Radeon?
Not new to building PCs but I want to build something thats current(ish) wont choke on new ish games, and give her a good user experience. (and won't cause me headache down the line)