At 1/21/15 08:23 PM, egg82 wrote: You can't tell me you wouldn't want to own the world's most powerful consumer gaming rig for a while.
It would be nice to have, yes, but I want it less than I want to not spend that much money on a computer. My rig can still play modern games so long as I don't max out the settings (I can still get a steady 60FPS in Far Cry 4, for example).
Also worth noting that "for a while" is less than a year; it really doesn't take long for GPUs to be outdated, and far more outdated than just "a little better".
At 1/21/15 08:23 PM, egg82 wrote: I disagree, depending on what you use it for. Any sort of video rendering, 32GB might be enough.
I've done lots of video rendering and never had problems with only 8GB of RAM. What rendering have you done that needs 32GB?
At 1/21/15 08:23 PM, egg82 wrote: Games, 32GB is slightly overkill, but screw it. Pay the extra $100 and get twice the RAM. Might as well go full Rambo at that point. RAM's cheap.
32GB is massively overkill for games, as overkill as you can possibly get, and having more won't make games run any faster/smoother. I've never once in my life needed more than 8GB for playing games, and I had never even heard of anyone needing more until you mentioned DA:I uses more, which just sounds like a memory leak more than anything (and 12GB would still suffice in that regard).
If you really want to go overkill on your computer why not put it toward the CPU or motherboard or something? Just doesn't make any sense to get extra RAM for the sake of having extra RAM.
At 1/21/15 08:23 PM, egg82 wrote: I was thinking 500GB for the OS, then maybe a 250GB-500GB for games and 1TB HDD for apps, movies, pictures, etc.
500GB for your OS seems rather excessive. I have a mere 128GB SSD for my OS, which has 25GB space remaining on it, even with Skyrim and like 10GB of mods installed on it. Having one for games would certainly make them load faster (I can load Skyrim in about four seconds), but that's it; it won't improve anything else.
It's also worth noting that write cycles are what will kill your SSD more so than anything else, so if you did end up using 500GB for your OS and have a tonne of free space that your applications aren't using, it would be unwise to treat it like a regular HDD and repeatedly add/deletes files onto/from it; it's an unfortunate limitation of the technology right now.
You could save some money by just getting one SSD for your OS and the very few games that have long enough load times to justify putting them on an SSD (Skyrim and GTA4 are the only two I've played with sufficiently lengthy load times).
At 1/21/15 08:23 PM, egg82 wrote: No, you certainly do not need to spend $2000 on a PC, but my god does that money make a difference.
My point was just that the difference is redundant.
At 1/21/15 08:23 PM, egg82 wrote: Pair of nice headphones. Honestly I don't see the appeal of speakers over headphones, the audio quality is very clearly worse with speakers. Even nice ones.
Saying that headphones are better is disingenuous; I've used headphones that are better than speakers and speakers that are better than headphones. I've also never used headphones with the quality of sound that my stereo has (this one), but the main reasons I prefer a stereo to headphones are: I don't need to wear something on my head; I can play games with other people in the room and they can still hear everything; I can make it loud without damaging my hearing (because there aren't speakers less than an inch from my ears); it has high quality bass; and discerning the direction sound comes from is easier because of the physical distance between the channels, which are like 1-2CM on headsets but around 6ft for my stereo.
And you certainly could easily name a headset with higher quality sound than my stereo, but I could just as easily name a better stereo than mine with better sound than a headset you could name; neither is inherently better than the other, it's a matter of how high quality the system is (most notably in regard to the fidelity).
Most of that is subjective, much like most arguments made in favour of headphones would be, but if you prefer a headset you could get one of those instead.
