NVidia GeForce RTX 30x0 cards

Janx said:

Was looking at their site. Is it just luck of the draw what card you get?

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I had the choice, but it looks like that is not an option now. Looks like shit actually is getting worse.

I'm on a seven year-old PC that I bought from Best Buy for The Elder Scrolls Online when it originally came out. It's an Asus and has served me well enough for as long as I've had it. The time to upgrade has come. I've never built a PC, but my brother has always built his. I thought this go around I would build one, and started looking at parts back in November. With the market on these 30x0 cards, I've come to the same conclusion as many others in this thread: I'm just going to buy another pre-built machine.

I'm not very knowledgeable about PCs, I've pretty much always just plugged them in and played. I know I'm exposing my ignorance here, but what's with the dislike of AlienWare here? I've always viewed them as the "too pricey for me, but top of the line" brand when it came to gaming setups. Based on the comments here, it seems I've had the wrong impression of the brand.

I'm looking to spend around $2000. Admittedly, I haven't shopped around a ton. I've looked at digitalstorm and alienware, and was just scoping ibuypower after someone mentioned it earlier today. Again, I'm not real savvy on this stuff. I don't know if I should get intel or amd. All I really know is I want one of these coveted 3070's - it's better than the 3060, and I'm not shelling out the money for a 80 or 90. I don't plan on streaming or anything like that, just wanna play my games and be well situated for the next 5ish years, comfortable knowing I can play whatever I want when it comes out without being restricted by my PC. Might be that I'm just approaching this all wrong?

Someone else can probably chime in a bit more, but.. Alienware used to be a fantastic brand. Then Dell bought them and the way they cut corners etc. takes them down a good notch. A lot of custom parts for their computers alone which makes future upgrading a shit show. The best way to figure out why people dislike Alienware is to watch one of the top streamers take apart one of the Alienware desktops and specify reasons. The one desktop PC I saw disassembled had such a strange build that even though it would run fine - the heat dissipation for the PC was horrible and would likely cut the longevity of the PC down significantly.

I feel like I would be wasting money buying a prebuilt - but as hard as it looks to get a video card that isnt twice its MSRP and even then, rare af.. I can at least understand why people would look outside of building it themselves.

Daidraco said:

Someone else can probably chime in a bit more, but.. Alienware used to be a fantastic brand. Then Dell bought them and the way they cut corners etc. takes them down a good notch. A lot of custom parts for their computers alone which makes future upgrading a shit show. The best way to figure out why people dislike Alienware is to watch one of the top streamers take apart one of the Alienware desktops and specify reasons. The one desktop PC I saw disassembled had such a strange build that even though it would run fine - the heat dissipation for the PC was horrible and would likely cut the longevity of the PC down significantly.

I feel like I would be wasting money buying a prebuilt - but as hard as it looks to get a video card that isnt twice its MSRP and even then, rare af.. I can at least understand why people would look outside of building it themselves.

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I never remember Alienware being a fantastic brand. Just overpriced. I remember it was always the brand that the kids who didn't know how to build a PC bought to showoff their new PC's, while paying three times the cost. But you did get quality parts.

Once Dell bought them out, they went from expensive quality...to expensive crapola.

Brahma said:

I never remember Alienware being a fantastic brand. Just overpriced. I remember it was always the brand that the kids who didn't know how to build a PC bought to showoff their new PC's, while paying three times the cost. But you did get quality parts.

Once Dell bought them out, they went from expensive quality...to expensive crapola.

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They used to be like Falcon Northwest. Great build quality, quality parts, great cases, rgb customization etc. w/ a warranty and a guaranteed delivery date. 28 days to deliver a 3070 right now for example.

Valorath said:

I'm on a seven year-old PC that I bought from Best Buy for The Elder Scrolls Online when it originally came out. It's an Asus and has served me well enough for as long as I've had it. The time to upgrade has come. I've never built a PC, but my brother has always built his. I thought this go around I would build one, and started looking at parts back in November. With the market on these 30x0 cards, I've come to the same conclusion as many others in this thread: I'm just going to buy another pre-built machine.

I'm not very knowledgeable about PCs, I've pretty much always just plugged them in and played. I know I'm exposing my ignorance here, but what's with the dislike of AlienWare here? I've always viewed them as the "too pricey for me, but top of the line" brand when it came to gaming setups. Based on the comments here, it seems I've had the wrong impression of the brand.

I'm looking to spend around $2000. Admittedly, I haven't shopped around a ton. I've looked at digitalstorm and alienware, and was just scoping ibuypower after someone mentioned it earlier today. Again, I'm not real savvy on this stuff. I don't know if I should get intel or amd. All I really know is I want one of these coveted 3070's - it's better than the 3060, and I'm not shelling out the money for a 80 or 90. I don't plan on streaming or anything like that, just wanna play my games and be well situated for the next 5ish years, comfortable knowing I can play whatever I want when it comes out without being restricted by my PC. Might be that I'm just approaching this all wrong?

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I was kind of in the same boat. I wanted to build my own, but any graphics card was so difficult to try to find it was looking like a full time job playing the lottery just to get one. I almost pulled the trigger on a Alienware, but after doing some research I found they use a lot of proprietary components, and their RTX 3070/3080 are custom 2 fan units made for them. All that may be fine, but even upgrading ram or modifying anything is a research project with limited options due to case design and components.

I next looked at cyberpower and ibuypower, but after settling on wanting a 3080 I found their current ship times are anywhere from 1-3 months with no guarantees. If you can wait, that is an option that at least allows for selecting some components and nothing is really proprietary or difficult to upgrade.

I ended up driving 3 hours to get a microcenter deal I posted a few times here that comes in and out of stock. Mostly name brand components (Asus Mobo/3080, Lian Li case, WD NVME drive, etc). I actually would have preferred the ibuypower or cyberpower because I would have gone AMD and changed a few things to save a little money, but the estimated 8 week ship date was a deal breaker for me and not worth the wait. I priced out every piece of the system at the time and it was a little more than $100 over what I would have paid for just the components had they been available. Not a bad deal given how limited 3080s are. If you do have a Microcenter close, they also have a 3070 system even more regularly in stock that someone here recently linked/purchased.

Valorath said:

I'm on a seven year-old PC that I bought from Best Buy for The Elder Scrolls Online when it originally came out. It's an Asus and has served me well enough for as long as I've had it. The time to upgrade has come. I've never built a PC, but my brother has always built his. I thought this go around I would build one, and started looking at parts back in November. With the market on these 30x0 cards, I've come to the same conclusion as many others in this thread: I'm just going to buy another pre-built machine.

I'm not very knowledgeable about PCs, I've pretty much always just plugged them in and played. I know I'm exposing my ignorance here, but what's with the dislike of AlienWare here? I've always viewed them as the "too pricey for me, but top of the line" brand when it came to gaming setups. Based on the comments here, it seems I've had the wrong impression of the brand.

I'm looking to spend around $2000. Admittedly, I haven't shopped around a ton. I've looked at digitalstorm and alienware, and was just scoping ibuypower after someone mentioned it earlier today. Again, I'm not real savvy on this stuff. I don't know if I should get intel or amd. All I really know is I want one of these coveted 3070's - it's better than the 3060, and I'm not shelling out the money for a 80 or 90. I don't plan on streaming or anything like that, just wanna play my games and be well situated for the next 5ish years, comfortable knowing I can play whatever I want when it comes out without being restricted by my PC. Might be that I'm just approaching this all wrong?

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The cyberpower custom I bought was $60 less than buying the retail parts and doing it myself and they did a solid job. It's the first time I've bought prebuilt ever and aside from slightly redoing their wiring it was plug and play. If I didn't go w/ a 3080 I might have just built it myself but so far it's been solid and getting put through the max setting paces. Slightly under 1 month from order date it was delivered.

The guts on the alienware are typically badly placed causing potential heat issues and realistically no chance of upgrading later. As stated in the above posts once they sold to dell the quality went to mass manufactured poop.

People like to say it's more expensive but the reality is that it's barely a premium and to me it's worth the time saved by not having to source materials/build/troubleshoot the damn thing (also USE COUPON). I used to build pcs all the time and I see no reason to anymore. Even the cabling quality is fine. Let them do the watercooling and mounting mobos/heatsyncs and finding 3080s. I'll swap in some better ram/videocard/hard drive if it comes to that, I usually skimp on those and upgrade them when I get the machine if possible to save a little bit of $. Ibuypower quoted me 6 weeks for a custom, and I got it in less than 4? Of course they are generous with their estimates. If you can't wait, they have prebuilt ones on their site and Amazon.

Plenty of options for same-day with 30xx:

Kiki said:

People like to say it's more expensive but the reality is that it's barely a premium and to me it's worth the time saved by not having to source materials/build/troubleshoot the damn thing (also USE COUPON). I used to build pcs all the time and I see no reason to anymore. Even the cabling quality is fine. Let them do the watercooling and mounting mobos/heatsyncs and finding 3080s. I'll swap in some better ram/videocard/hard drive if it comes to that. Ibuypower quoted me 6 weeks for a custom, and I got it in less than 4? Of course they are generous with their estimates. If you can't wait, they have prebuilt ones on their site and Amazon.

Plenty of options for same-day with 30xx:

Prebuilt Gaming PCs: Same Day RDY Systems: iBUYPOWER®

Prebuilt Gaming PCs by iBUYPOWER®. Shop weekly deals on prebuilt computers and desktops. Same Day RDY Systems include free 2 day shipping.

www.ibuypower.com

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3090 for $3500 is the only one that is actually in stock for same day ship. It has been that way since I had started looking in early February. For custom they are stating an extra 2 weeks for 3070, and an extra 6 weeks for a 3080. If you go to their reddit it is all over the place for actual ship times. Some 3070 orders are shipping in 2 weeks, while others have been waiting over two months. It looks like lead time may be improving on the 3070s, but stimulus payments may cause another holiday type shortage soon.

My wife's cyberpowerpc came in a couple weeks ago and overall I would recommend it. I cut costs by setting it to cheapest possible ram to later order a set on sale and no win10 key since they are 10 bucks elsewhere. It came with a gigabyte 3070 gaming OC as the random card.

The only issue is the case did not use the fans I expected (the phanteks eclipse knock off) which isn't a huge deal I guess and had to swap the coolermaster cpu cooler fan/pump connections on the motherboard. The price was only $1050 for it in early february which is totally insane now for a 3070 build.

Melicant said:

3090 for $3500 is the only one that is actually in stock for same day ship. It has been that way since I had started looking in early February. For custom they are stating an extra 2 weeks for 3070, and an extra 6 weeks for a 3080. If you go to their reddit it is all over the place for actual ship times. Some 3070 orders are shipping in 2 weeks, while others have been waiting over two months. It looks like lead time may be improving on the 3070s, but stimulus payments may cause another holiday type shortage soon.

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There is a 3060 currently for $1400. I received my custom at the end of Feb after ordering it at the end of Jan. I'm sure alot has to do with when they receive a shipment.

Dell had a monopoly on basic PC's, what, 10 years ago? They took advantage of it, earned their shit name for how they undercut everyone with high end one pieces and dirt cheap completes. (thats great, you have a 200 CPu in a 40 PC build). Its just too bad that most companies bought into that shit so a lot of your businesses are using PC's that can barely run Minecraft. Even worse how they are locked into computer leases for almost a decade sometimes. Now private companies ultimate answer is to buy one powerful server type of architecture and stream all their clients from a central database. Think Nvidia GO, but limited to just your companies PC's. It turns out, the upfront cost of this way is expensive, but in the long run - extremely cheap.

Could always wait for 4000 series, probably can get one before a PS5.

I had an Alienware Aurora (?) prebuilt, water cooled back in 2010 in anticipation for FFXIV 1.0. Cost somewhere around 2k. Game ended up being shit but the computer served me well. I ended up reselling it.

Edit, found specs in email. Probably thought I was hot shit with dual video cards lol.