New PC for work

[kalstrand]

I am going to need a new desktop PC for work shortly and my boss will most likely leave it up to me so I am looking for options. My personal machine I would build myself but since this will be for work I would rather go with a prebuilt.

I design trusses for a truss manufacturer and it looks like we will be starting to do some residential design as well. Given the probable service life of the machine I think I want to go with a I7 and my truss design software as well as most of the home design software I have been looking at recommend a discrete video card with 1GB memory. Probably at least 8GB of system RAM as well. As far as HDD my truss designs don't take much space. I don't know what kind of file sizes to expect from the other software. Given the prices on HDDs I would probably start at 1TB and go from there. I want Win7 64bit OS for a couple reasons. I don't like Win8 and my truss design software is not supported on Win8. It will probably run but they will not officially support it until the next version.

I looked at Dell and HP and it seems the good ol' days of being able to get what you want are over as neither really much in the way of customization at least on PCs with Win7. Toshiba only appears to have all-in-ones and Lenovo didn't offer anything with Win7.

Do you guys have any recommendations for any of the smaller boutique builders that will have the options to get what I want and still offer a decent warranty and support?

 

[KTYSTO]

I need a new desktop for work too. The one I'm using is hopelessly slow

 

[digibucc]

If you are comfortable building for yourself I recommend building for work. You will get better components at better prices that way, and they should all be warrantied individually. As far as prebuilt, I don't know about most people but when it comes to prebuilt I see them as mostly the same. there is no general rule anymore on which company to go with because they are all crap imo.

toshiba has the best reliability in my experience with laptops, but no matter what you do if you want windows 7 you will be buying an older model. no new models will come with it, unless it is a downgrade option. and just to throw my 2c in, unless your software will not work with 8, don't avoid it so strongly. 8.1 will be out soon and it is nice, but even 8 was good once i got used to it. Also make sure you get a disk and not just a recovery image, especially for work. you will want to remove all of their bloatware as well.

best of luck bud

 

[Hood]

http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/ or http://www.ibuypower.com/home.aspx Both of these sites let you configure it any way you want, including the operating system.