What computer?

Looking for a new computer. Primary use is photo work, secondary is light gaming. Most intense games being Skyrim SE and WoW classic. Day to day internet use is handled on my iPad. 

Preferred format would be an All in one or laptop. I’m open to building a tower if the $ to power ratio is good. 

My OS preference is tricky. My requirements have it narrowed to Mac or Win 10, in that order. 

Top pick would be an iMac, followed by a large screen windows laptop(17” preferred , 15” minimum), windows All in one, and a windows tower(home built over store bought) last. 

Used or new?

iMac looks like the easy button to me, but might be prohibitively priced and then there's the fun re the limited upgradeability. That said, I don't recall seeing a Windows all in one that is similarly powerful and/or has better upgradability but then again I didn't look too hard.

My big issue with all-in-ones is that, well, they're all in ones which basically makes them a non-portable laptop with all the downsides that come with that.  If you need a mostly portable machine I'd go for a 15"-ish laptop with a good external monitor and keyboard instead. But then, I'm a keyboard snob and can never have enough space on the monitors.

As an alternative to a home built tower, maybe look into building a SFF box based on a mini-ITX mainboard? That's what I nearly ended up doing for the Windows/Linux box I'll hopefully put together over the long weekend. Only reason I didn't do that was that I already have a perfectly usable case and powersupply for that machine.

Oh, and if you'd consider used, I'd look at the Lenovo P series, specifically the P51 and P52. Those are mobile workstations in laptop form, although I don't know how well they do with gaming.

Shopping new. 

I’m looking at $1300 on an iMac. I’m currently “using” an old Win7 laptop with a 17” screen. From day 1 I’ve used it as a “portable” desktop. I’m used to a lack of ability to upgrade. 

For a windows device, I would be looking to spend less.  Either way, I would be looking to backup my photo work on an external. 

I'd grab an official Apple refurb'd iMac then. That's how I bought my last one (I've since moved to a cheese grater Mac Pro that's been mucked about with) and I was pretty happy with it.

My choice would be this one or similar but it's a bit above your budget at $1500-something. They have a selection of 21.5" ones in your price range, though.

And of course you can run Windows on them if you really want .

New apple stuff has lagged behind.  Not much improvement, and there is tons of progress on the Windows side.  Asus gets some of the highest ratings.  Lenovo is right up there as well.

Last summer I picked up an Asus Republic of Gamers laptop.  17" screen, 16gb memory, 1TB HDD, 500gb SSD, 6GB dedicated video memory in the Nvidia card, 8th gen i7 hexacore that will overclock to 4.2ghz.  I can load up two hours of 4K footage and play with it for hours and it's like a Semi truck carrying a styrofoam cooler.

It is by far the finest laptop I have ever owned.  It was $1399 but I got it for $1100 as an open box at Best Buy.  From a cold start to the login screen is 7 seconds.  I got it because I do a lot of HD and 4K video, and also use it as a home studio recording setup.  When I was shopping last summer, I asked here and even some of the die-hard Mac guys were telling me to go Windows or used Mac.  I wasn't going to spend nearly $1k for a refurbed Mac from 2014 when I can get a fully upgradable Windows machine for a couple hundred more.

Comparing mine to a Mac in the same price range, there just is no comparison.  Not even close.  If you are comfy with Windows, your dollar goes SO much further.

I spent 700 building a new tower for classic wow and love it. On the other hand we purchased a new hp gaming laptop for my wife at the same price point and it works fantastic other then slower load times because it lacks the SSD that my tower has. It's using a generation older gpu then my set up but she's been really happy with it.

Seconded going windows tower over a Mac. Even the most recent Mac has lagged behind a good 4 years despite it's purchase price, and since your laptop is still working fine I don't see a need for you to get another.

Since you're wanting to do photo work secondary to light gaming, you have a large choice of options since you're not doing too much. You can either:

1. Go for an APU- a CPU that has some of it's cores slaved to running graphics, a Ryzen "G" component.
2. Go small CPU+GPU, giving you more headroom in exchange for costing more.

People have built light gaming PCs on the Ryzen 3 3200G with good success, making computers for less than $400 with some scrounging. As for the second route the world is kinda your oyster, but be careful when it comes to Intel and sockets- there's plenty of different (and confusing) types now, as I found when I went searching for a 1151 for a spare-parts PC I recently made for a friend. You have GREAT options for cheap budget cards tho- the RX570 can be had as low as $130 and you can find GTX 1060s for a little more though the prices are all off thanks to RTX. Personally, since all AMD CPUs use the same socket I'd stick to ryzen since it'll allow you to easily upgrade your CPU if you want more processing power.

Also FYI- Ryzen CPUs naturally max out memory at 2666Mhz, and Intel CPUs at 2133Mhz. Unless you're planning on overclocking your RAM (which it sounds like you aren't) there's no reason to buy RAM that has a high clock speed.

EDIT: Also, go SSD or go home. M.2 SSDs are awesome and well worth the cost- use a HDD for storage.

I bought this Lenovo 4 years ago.  It's a 3.5GHz Xeon processor, 4 cores (8 actually, but it acts like 4 with some kind of dual thread switching stuff), 32GB RAM that I usually use like 5 max.  I'm happy with it.  Got it from Tiger Direct Business.

I run a Macbook Pro laptop.  When at home I plug in a big screen monitor, and with a mouse and a full size keyboard it works as well as a stationary computer, but I can take it with me and use it remotely as well.

I know nothing about gaming but for regular day to day use for other stuff it works just fine - if Macs are four years behind you couldn't prove it by me.

GIRTHQUAKE said:

EDIT: Also, go SSD or go home. M.2 SSDs are awesome and well worth the cost- use a HDD for storage.

Holy wow you ain't kidding. I just bought a Lenovo Yoga 730 2-in-1 laptop with Core i7 and an HDD. That thing is stupid fast, even when I'm doing big vector design stuff and image editing.

Probably not what you need for gaming, but I've been very happy with it so far - although the battery life could be longer.

I built a budget Ryzen 7 gaming rig for my 16 yo.  Prolly about a grand in parts, maybe a little more.   He's pretty happy with it, and you know how kids are.  I used both a conventional HDD and an SSD for the OS.  It boots Win10 stupid fast.

I don't trust an SSD for longevity.  This box is literally ten years old.  Still boots up from a WD hard drive.  Would an SSD still be delivering up data? 

stuart in mn said:

I know nothing about gaming but for regular day to day use for other stuff it works just fine - if Macs are four years behind you couldn't prove it by me.

The hardware on Macs has been lagging behind what you can get for regular PCs for quite a while, although they're finally starting to do something about it. There are some other aspects of their hardware that I don't like much that comes from their obsession with making them thinner (like SSDs soldered to the board, really?, the whole keyboard debacle etc).

In general my recommendation is to stick with the OS family you already have - if you're a Windows user you might as well stick to Windows, if you're already a Mac user and have the software for Mac, stick to Mac. Well, at least if you're not being paid to fiddle with the OS and learn your way around it.

Windows machines tend to have advantages went it comes to pure specs (ie, leaving things like build quality, component quality etc out of the picture), IME a lot of the price advantage disappears when you stop comparing cheap consumer Windows laptops with MacBook Pros. That said, I do like Windows business laptops (specifically Lenovo) because so far they had the edge in repairability and keyboard quality. But for those you're not that far away from the MacBook Pro pricepoint either.

Where Windows has a big advantage is that they tend to be supported by the OS vendor for a much longer time. Apple has that habit of discontinuing OS upgrades for machines somewhere around the five year mark.

1988RedT2 said:

I don't trust an SSD for longevity.  This box is literally ten years old.  Still boots up from a WD hard drive.  Would an SSD still be delivering up data? 

I have some laptops with SSDs at work that are 6 years old now.  Haven’t had to replace any yet, and usually batches of systems this old have spinning disks die fairly frequently.

SSD longevity has come a long way, and HDD longevity isn't that great anymore. I just had to swap out all HDD drives on my NAS and those were only 2-3 years old, but close to failing based on the SMART data. The SSD that I had to swap out in my Mac Pro was a lot older than that when it failed by running out of spare sectors to write to.

The big difference between an SSD and an HDD is that often a failed SSD manifests itself as a complete failure, but a failed HDD will still kinda sorta maybe let you boot if you're lucky, and you can usually pay someone a lot of money to recover data from an HDD.

I haven't had any SSDs fail yet. Regardless, "any disk could fail at any time" is a good motto to keep in mind. If it fails within warranty, well, great, you can get it replaced. Otherwise...I hope you have your stuff backed up. (I kinda sorta have *some* of it backed up, and it's killing me inside that I don't have a better backup solution than "some of it's on Google Drive, some is in Dropbox, and some of it is on a USB stick somewhere.")

SSDs are 100% worth it, regardless.

slowbird said:

I haven't had any SSDs fail yet. Regardless, "any disk could fail at any time" is a good motto to keep in mind.

True, but most users don't, and their data has historically been protected only by the recoverable (and often foreshadowed and predictable) nature of most HDD failures, which is what makes SSDs so much more risky for the average user.

Statistically they're less likely to suffer some kind of hardware failure than a HDD. It's just that when it happens, there's no warning, no predicting it, and almost always no recoverability.

GameboyRMH said:

slowbird said:

I haven't had any SSDs fail yet. Regardless, "any disk could fail at any time" is a good motto to keep in mind.

True, but most users don't, and their data has historically been protected only by the recoverable (and often foreshadowed and predictable) nature of most HDD failures, which is what makes SSDs so much more risky for the average user.

Statistically they're less likely to suffer some kind of hardware failure than a HDD. It's just that when it happens, there's no warning, no predicting it, and almost always no recoverability.

Hardly, as we PC details they really aren't risky at all. They even come with built-in programs like Samsung Magician which can give you a good idea of how healthy your drive is- on the other hand, I only knew my last 3TB HDD was dying because I began loosing files and hearing clicking. And this drive was only used for music and media!

Besides, even still it just underscores the need for regular backups. No matter what, Solid State Drives are faster, use less power and are more reliable in the long term than a hard disk drive, which wins out only in cost per Gigabyte/terabyte. 

Hey Brian, for kicks do you want a few expremental ideas from PC parts picker? And are you using Reddit's "Build a PC Sales"?

In reply to Brian :

What is so magical about upgrade??? Learn the system you have and you'll be faster than an upgrade. I use Windows 7 Professional 64bit. It  is FAST, STEADY and CLOUD FREE. 

Windows 7 is also about to go off support by Microsoft, which means no more updates and very risky to use online.

aircooled said:

Windows 7 is also about to go off support by Microsoft, which means no more updates and very risky to use online.

I turned off my Win 7 updates back when they were bogging down my machine pushing Win 10 updates without my consent.  Of course, I use Windows just a few times a month.

While it's totally reasonable to use windows 7 to keep off the Microsoft cloud/botnet, you're still about to loose legacy support. Not too big a deal if you're smart about your internet use and use a good VPN, but most of the people who claim to be privacy proponents don't- like myself!

Besides, he's looking to make a basic machine for light gaming and photo editing. If he uses Firefox as a browser with NoScript, exploding cookies and uBlock Origin he'll have great protection from the getgo right there.