I’m looking at this deal for a prebuilt:
Lenovo LOQ 17IRR9 Tower PC — $749.99
- Intel Core i5-14400F (10 cores, 16 threads, up to 4.7GHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 (8GB GDDR6)
- RAM 16GB DDR5
- 512GB SSD
- PSU 500W
For some context, my PC has a 1070 in it. I’m a budget conscious gamer, usually playing at 1080p. With ram prices skyrocketing and steam betting on steam machines with low vram going forwards, I feel like it’s an okay deal for a guy who upgrades basically never.
It seems like a nice deal to me. Anyone want to talk me out of it?
I feel like this is not a great deal. Keep in mind that pre-builts are in general, a gamble. They often advertise the parts that people might know (CPU/GPU) but fill the other parts (PSU, MoBo, RAM, computer case, fans, CPU cooler) with cheap garbage.
Now this PC is $250 short of $1000 (before tax and shipping) and you are getting a low end CPU from an old Intel generation, a mid/low end GPU from a prior generation (only +50% performance compared to the 1070), half the ram capacity you’d want, and absolutely terrible hard drive space at only 512 gb.
Can you wait until the current bubble crashes and prices come back down?
Regardless of how the AI bubble will behave, corporations are pushing hard to discourage private hardware ownership in favour of rented cloud-based services. It is very unlikely that availability will ever return to the situation it was prior to the current situation, they will attempt to force cloud services through artificial scarcity and high prices on hardware.
Yes; however, I’m getting the personal vibe that gaming hardware progress is massively plateauing. Still, I may hold off. Tbh, I’ve kind of been waffling on buying a new PC since 2017. My 1070 is juuuust old enough now that I’m starting to see some games I straight up can’t run at 30 fps.
This whole manufacturing crisis in the USA (that’s where I live) coupled with depressed wages and aaa games not interesting me… It’s all kind of discouraging. I’m tempted to just buy something good enough and sit for another 10 years. Perhaps I’m just being reactionary to the increasing prices and looking for a ‘deal.’
Can you build it yourself for cheaper?
Also, IMO 16GB is bare minimum in 2026 if you are using Windows. I’d really go to 32GB.
who has $1000 extra to spend on 32gb of RAM… (joke, but not really…)
It’s 2026. If you are on windows you should be planning your switch to Linux.
Microsoft has no interest in you owning a computer. You can buy access to stream game rentals from their data centers while AI inserts ads and micro transactions into all the games.
And as someone who uses Linux for literally everything I know better than to preach as if Linux is a full replacement for Windows. It’s not and there are absolutely reasons to still use windows. OP isn’t asking about the OS and given the nature of the question probably isn’t ready for such a switch in the first place.
10 cores, 16 threads. How does that work out, is it some bigLittle system?
Just curious, last intel I used was like gen 8.
Yes. Intel now splits their CPU’s with “P” cores (performance) that function like normal x86 processors with hyperthreading, and “E” cores (efficiency) that are lower clocked, less feature rich cores without HT.
Most OS and background tasks can be loaded on E cores while P cores work strictly on high performance programs. Its not bad, except for the fact that its Intel building them.
