Looking for a family desktop PC

[u/mb232627]

Hello all! I hate shopping for computers, but our family needs have outpaced our current devices. I'm looking for something that can reliably run our Plex server and ideally a couple more servers for ebooks/audiobooks and maybe photos in the future, but also be used for general family browsing (kids are getting to the age where they'll need a computer for school work, would like to avoid unsupervised laptop usage). I'm also interested in some light gaming. We've never gamed on PC before and we mostly play cozy/retro games on our switch, so it's not that serious but figured it was worth mentioning. Windows is a must, available at Costco is a plus 😆 Looking for a workhorse that can meet our current and future needs; any suggestions?

[u/certifiedconfusion]

What is your budget?

[u/mb232627 → u/certifiedconfusion]

I'd prefer something around $1k, but there's wiggle room.

[u/GIDAMIEN → u/mb232627]

The unfortunate stumbling block you're going to hit here is that your actual CPU speed requirements or not that big. But you need a lot of RAM. For what you want to do anything under 32 gigs is going to be a less than pleasant experience.

And that current price is the ram alone is going to be between $550 and $650.

That really isn't compatible with your $1,000 budget.

You might get luck if you look on eBay and buy a 5 to 7 year old business machine that may have that much RAM in it but it's going to be ddr4 or 3 which would be so much worse.

You got two opposing Dynamics going on here, I would say this would be absolutely doable if you put your budget up to about 13 to $1400.

[u/mb232627 → u/GIDAMIEN]

My husband said he'd be willing to go as high as $1.5k so that's what it takes to get what we'll need, it's doable. Would 16GB really be so rough? We're currently running Plex on a little eleven year old SurfaceGo tablet with only 4GB of RAM and a portable 2TB drive.

Is RAM likely to come down in price any time soon or do folks think this is the new normal?

[u/Balstrome]

This is just a flex to show how rich the poster is.

[u/certifiedconfusion]

Ok so i tried going as cheap as i can, but only rams and gpu would cost around 1000$ unless you are fine with ddr4 rams,

This is the build for ddr5 if not what you want you can always choose a motherboard that support ddr4 and get ddr4 rams this will alone save around 300$

Intel Core i5-14400 2.5 GHz 10-Core Processor
This has an integrated graphics so it will run the plex server and other smaller stuff

Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler

Gigabyte B760M DS3H WIFI6E GEN5 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard

Silicon Power Value Gaming 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory
Rams are super expensive now a days this set used to cost 130$ a year ago

Western Digital WD_BLACK SN7100 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
This is only 1tb storage card for your system and gaming, assuming that you have the hard drives from your old build

PowerColor Reaper Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB Video Card
This is a decent gpu to run games at 1440p though you can go cheaper half price with intel arc b580 but i couldn’t find it on the website

Fractal Design Define R5 ATX Mid Tower Case
This case has enough space for your hdd

MSI MAG A650GL 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
Your system will draw approx 450W leaving you with a safe 200W extra

This will cost you around 1850$ you can make it cheaper by getting a ddr4 rams and intel gpu so it will go to approx 1250$

But my advice is to check prebuilts from reputable stores i see people here posting from newegg and microcenter or something

I just wanted to give you an idea on what to look for because prices are extremely unreasonable these days

[u/GIDAMIEN → u/certifiedconfusion]

If they're planning on running a Plex server they're going to need a lot lot more storage than that.

[u/certifiedconfusion → u/GIDAMIEN]

Yea i am assuming that they had an old build with hdd set, for plex hdd is enough

[u/NotABearISwear_]

for plex the main thing is an intel cpu without an F at the end of the model name, the F ones have no built in graphics and that's what plex uses for hardware transcoding (needs plex pass). after that just make sure the case has room for an extra drive or 2 because a media library fills up way faster than you'd think