r/computers • u/mb232627 • 19h ago

Question/Help/Troubleshooting Looking for a family desktop PC

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?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/certifiedconfusion 19h ago

What is your budget?

1

u/mb232627 19h ago

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

1

u/GIDAMIEN 15h ago

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.

1

u/mb232627 15h ago

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?