Beat Dell XPS 8920 for price?

_hybrid_

Hey everybody - first time builder here.

I have been looking at some of the pc parts sites but I'm getting quite confused and anything I try to build with similar specs seems to cost more than the Dell XPS 8920? (€1319 version here http://www.dell.com/ie/p/xps-8920-desktop/pd?ref=PD_OC)

Can anyone recommend a better build for similar price that I could build myself?...mainly a workstation style comp - intensive use of GIS Software, Adobe Creative Suite and will possibly start to experiment with machine learning etc....no gaming. Ideally want an SSD for OS + 2 2TB hard drives for mirrored RAID array

Any help would be really appreciated - it seems like a very steep learning curve initially to start building your own computer!

L

Direct link to the Dell PC in question for those looking.

One thing to bear in mind when looking at mass built machines is they tend to splurge on a few shiny seeming parts & shave costs on anything that they don't explicitly mention in their blurb. You'll also at a minimum pay extra for any extra HDs you have as opposed to adding them yourself to a single HD prebuilt.

If you're looking for somewhere to get a feel on how much the components in that are worth, try Geizhals (the EU flag symbol in the top left will swap it to English language). Mindfactory is the site a lot of us would use these days as well as Amazon.co.uk (Depends on how much you're ordering & what pieces for which one is cheaper).

The learning curve on building your own isn't so bad - I'd start working from a spec or guide though.

Xenoronin

An equivalent PC (with Ryzen 1700) would come to around 1200-1300€ according to my research, so it's pretty much spot on price-wise (attached PC does not have windows cost included and is only 19%VAT rather than 21%). The 1060 graphics card is probably overkill for your needs, as even though adobe does have hardware acceleration, it doesn't need much grunt to run photoshop or premier pro smoothly. (so the 480 in the attached PC build isn't really necessary... though Ryzen 7 doesn't have an inbuilt GPU so some GPU is needed).

So it's up to you to decide what you value more tbh, freedom to configure to your liking, with quality parts. Or just having it show up at your door, fully built.

Building isn't massively difficult to get into by the way. There are a lot of acronyms flying about but it boils down to choosing a CPU that suits your workload (more cores, or fewer but faster cores). Adding a motherboard that supports that CPU (socket type). Add RAM that the motherboard supports (DDR4 being latest). Add a graphics card if necessary (AMD have the RX series, NVidia are on the 10 series). Add hard drives. Add a PSU that won't fry the components and won't leave you out the door with an electricity bill. Find a case that fits it all (ATX, mATX, mITX are all sizes of motherboards).
Done. There is more two it when you dig in, but it's easy enough to pick up if you want to invest a bit of time into it.

ryzenpc.PNG

2ndcoming

Agree with all the above. By choosing your own components you're getting high quality known brand specialist parts across the board for less.

With your workstation needs this seems like a model for a Ryzen 1800X build, processor crushes the I7 in that Dell in multi-threaded applications.

Here's a list I threw together on pcpartpicker. Hope it works, I'm on mobile here.

https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/RY6Yhq

You could throw the whole build together on mindfactory.de and come in under price.

Xenoronin

Nice thing to note is that you don't have to shell out the extra money for the 1800X. The 1700 can be overclocked to equivalent performance.

_hybrid_

Sincere thanks for this guys - plenty of food for thought there. Still undecided whether to build or just go for the dell but will be back on here if its a build:)

Luck100

Some of the machine learning libraries use GPU acceleration (especially for deep learning). I think NVidia cards are generally preferred for those cases. Here's an example:

https://medium.com/@acrosson/building-a-deep-learning-box-d17d97e2905c#.6k0o4npzp