Best pre-built i7 option

demonic_pascal

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Hey. I'm a digital art student who is starting to get into 3D animation. My current desktop is a crappy Pentium D Optiplex 745, needles to say that wont hold up well in 3D. I want to get a new desktop, but I don't want to go Core 2, because of limited upgrade paths now that i7 and x58 are out. My budget is about $1500, and while theres a great option that serves my needs for $1300 from iBuyPower.com, I've heard nothing but bad things about the company. ANother option would be Dell's Studio XPS Core i7 system, but with the small case and proprietary parts, upgrading in the future would more then likely be problematic

I guess my question is, for $1500 or less, whats my best option for a decent i7 machine?

Thanks

EDIT: Just realzied that my needs were kinda vague, so I'll try and go into a bit more detail:

As far as a CPU goes, I'll take any i7 chip. The 920 will be more then enough for what I want to do, and anything higher will probably be outta my price range.

RAM, 3 GB will be fine, more is obv better though

GPU: I need something decent, since I'll be rendering a fair amount of polys in real time when doing 3D modelling. I'd personally like at least a 9800 GT / HD 4850, but, again, higher is better. The iBuyPower had a GTX 260, so if theres something else liek that, I wouldnt mind playing a bit of Crysis during my down time xD

Everything else I'm fine with whatever, as long as its not garbage. Pretty much all the x58 MoBo's are decent at this point, so Im not worried about that. Dont care about optical drives, though Blu-Ray would be a nice perk (again, the iBuyPower had one for under $1400...). But yea, thats about it...
 
Are you willing to build it yourself? it'll save yourself some money

I've never built a system myself before, and while I don't doubt my ability to learn, I need the machine for a class Im taking next semester, and I would need it to be reliable. If I made some mistake building it and killed a critical component, or something happened and I didnt have a warrenty, Im screwed.

Id love to finally build my first rig, and if this was just for fun, I'd be asking for thoughts on a component list Id thrown together. But I need prebuilt at this point simply for the peace of mind and simplicity at this point.

So I guess no xD
 
Aren't Dells a pain in the butt to mess with?

God yes...upgrading from an Optiplex 745. PSU is proprietary, which means Im stuck with a crappy x1300 GPU since the PSU cant handle anything better. MoBo is proprietary, so Im stuck with a 2.8 GHz Pentium D, since the MoBo doesnt support Core 2...its a nightmare...
 
I know two guys who got systems from IBuyPower, they were fine.
One of them had a motherboard die on him, but they covered it.

I would suggest learning how to build your own machine. Try getting your hands on some older computers that nobody really cares about anymore. I got my initial experience from old Pentium II and III machines.
 
[offtopic]Oh wow...when I saw that they put 12GB of RAM in the $2500 model, my jaw dropped...oh well.

I kind of want to sell my 4850 now...[/offtopic]
 
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