Help me buy a PC for poker (money no object)

[HEK]

I'm gonna start looking into buying a new desktop pc and have no clue on where to begin, what to look for or anything. I'm a hardware idiot.

I have tons of money so it's no object. Don't get me wrong, I don't wanna spend 15 grand on a computer. A few grand is what I would expect to pay but will pay more if it's worth it I want the fastest, most durable, troublefree, most badass pc I can find.

Thanks guys! Now fire away...

[obsidian]

VoodooPC sells some very nice although very expensive computers.

[Kneel B4 Zod]

you don't need the fastest or most badass for poker, or anything close really. durable and troublefree are key of course.

you could go spend $500 or $600 on a Dell and have a sweet poker PC. Just get plenty of RAM, a nice Pentium chip, and video cards to suit your monitor (1? 2? more?) needs. the peripherals are almost more important these days (do you want a DVD burner? TV card? huge hard drive for storing video files?). but like I said, this stuff doesn't matter for poker.

there are some Dell haters here, but I really don't understand why.

then, donate the rest to charity, b/c you'd be wasting it on a $2k computer to play poker on.

[Sierra]

Can you play poker anywhere with the wireless, or are you subject to places you have wireless access?

[deadmoney314]

The reason I dislike dell is my friends keep getting them and they keep bugging me to help them reload/revive/restore them. They use poor quality hard drives in their rigs then you usually don't get a person advising you that you should have a line conditioner to keep your computer from frying sometime down the future.
Sadly enough, you should look for someone who knows what they are doing at a Best Buy and get a complete solution based upon your needs--just don't get the base model of any manufacturer with the celeron or sempron processor. Get a Pentium or any AMD non-sempron.
If I don't have the time to help a buddy personally, I will tell him to do exactly that and get a Gateway. It will cost you about $300 or more than building it from scratch but you will be taken care of.
If you have access to someone who is certified, have them buy OEM parts from newegg and contruct a rig for cheaper, it will run faster. Pay them $100 for their time and everyone will be happy. Be careful of selecting someone to do this though, there are a lot of wannabes that won't know that you should get a line conditioner on all your nice new speedy parts and in turn won't ground themselves before touching all your nice new internal circuits when putting them together (even some certified ones).

[Rhett]

Computers are like cars. You can spend in infinate amount of money on a computer if you want to. If you're willing to spend a few grand, you can have a much better computer than most people in a day-and-age where most people pay $499. However, if you want to be happy about your purchase, you need to be specific about where you want the money to go.

Things you need to consider:

-Your LCD Layout (how many, how will they be mounted, what sizes?)
-Your cpu power (how does dual dual-core sound?)
-Graphics( 2 top-of-the-line Nvidia Sli enabled cards in that box, or 4?)
-Hard drives (15k rpm raid 0 for the best access speed?, or a couple of 400GB disks for massive storage, or both?)
-Sound (are we water cooling this, or do you want to spring for that $700 Zalman "totally no noise" case?)
-Form factor (do you want to travel with this thing?)
-Backup Power (Do you need 1 hour UPS backup time for poker?)
-Internet (You will need a QoS enabled low latency router for sure)

I have already told you in the other thread that if you're willing to spend a few grand on your computer, I will build it for you without charging a fee. I would just like the experience of putting together a really cool rig. I am extremely over-qualified to build a computer. Contact me, if you are interested, and we can build exactly what you want.

[Rhett]

It just occured to me that since you don't care about money, you probably don't care that I won't charge you a build fee. So just order though some online specialist. I just put together a pretty good computer package that I wouldn't mind having from http://www.thinkmate.com fora about $12k . Maybe I could save $1-2k if I bought the parts and built it myself, but that's pretty small change.

If the $12k computer isn't good enough, they make it pretty easy for you to rack up a $20k box. I suspect that around $10k, you might see money is more of an object. But hell, people spend $100k all the time for a slightly nicer car. If you use your computer every day, I think it's pretty reasonable for you to drop $20k, or whatever you want on something good.

[Shoe Lace]

You can build a STACKED machine for about $800 shipped, filled with all high quality parts. Just search www.pricewatch.com

I swear by the following brands:

Abit/Asus for motherboards (never had any weird issues with them)
Crucial for ram (always good stuff, never had a stick die on me -- not even once)
Maxtor for HDs (been using them for years and years, they are top notch)
Creative for sound cards
ATI and nvidia make solid vid cards. Preference really, whoever happens to be offering a better card at the best price wins.

That is $800 without a monitor though. Monitor selection is tough.

If physical deskspace and looks aren't an issue:
2x 22" CRTs are way the go ($500 shipped for both, and you can run 8 tables easy, way more on party).

If you have $$ to blow, I guess 2 of these wouldn't be a bad idea, can't vouch for how good it is though (a bit out of my range heh):
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1017391

When I built my first computer I was a total hardware newbie too. I had a little bit of a safety net (If I got stuck, I could call a friend), but he showed me that building your own machine is 100x cheaper, very reliable, and dead easy.

Haven't looked back since. The last 3 computers I've built in the last 10 years still work to this day. 2 of them are in use, and 1 of them is collecting dust in my basement (but works as far as I know...it did about 6 months ago).

If you have a techie type friend just tell him what you want to do (poker only? games too? crazy sound system? etc.) to help get a list of exact parts. That $800 range I quoted above assumes you want a high end personal computer. It'll be more than enough for poker/general use and is capable of running newer games quite nicely but won't be the absolute best gaming machine ever.

If you have to splurge on something, do it on a chair.