re: Son building gaming computer...qc these parts...

quote:

---

will YOU tell me what's wrong with the DELL?

---

A gaming PC should always have particular emphasis on the graphics card. A good rule of thumb for gaming builds is to devote about a third of your budget to the graphics card.

That Dell is configured for video editing, autocad, 3d modeling, etc. because it has an i7, a crapload of RAM, and a low-end dedicated GPU to assist with a few GPU-accelerated functions in workstation programs. However, that GPU would be terribly insufficient for gaming. Sure, it might run some games at low settings and low resolution, but it's an $80 GPU that would best fit a very low-budget build. On the other hand, the CPU and RAM in that dell are overkill for gaming in that they don't add any additional performance benefit in virtually all games. There's a couple hundred dollars there that's wasted -- you pull that money out by dropping down to an i5 and 8GB of RAM and put it toward a GPU that would be several times faster than the GTX 745.