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New Computer Suggestions...
- Thread starter Farmboy
- Start date
WildWestDesigns
Active Member
"Off the shelf", I like the Lenovo ThinkStations, but they are still going to be pricey, but they last.
I also like them, because they work well with Linux and that's the way that I was going and just run VMs for my work.
Now you can get used ones that will still last for a good long bit as well.
Otherwise, my suggestion would be custom (which I know you don't want to go at this point).
I also like them, because they work well with Linux and that's the way that I was going and just run VMs for my work.
Now you can get used ones that will still last for a good long bit as well.
Otherwise, my suggestion would be custom (which I know you don't want to go at this point).
KaranGrewal
New Member
Totally recommend Signburst.
Graphics@ToysForTrucks
New Member
reQ
New Member
If you don't know much about PCs & what hardware you need to run your software smoothly - use SignBurst merchant. If you know enough about it & would like to save big chunk of money- buy parts & put it together yourself. I am building my own PCs since i was 15 years old so i don't have to buy pre assembled stations & pay premium.
Mr. Sign Pro
New Member
Over the past 13 years I have had Dells, Signburst and HP's. I prefer HP machines. You can also find some steep coupons on HP's. I bought a new system a few months back and maxed out all the specs and was able to get it for around $1800 because they were running a 40% promo at the time.
SignBurst PCs
New Member
WoW! Thanks everyone. 
I appreciate the recommendations and kind words.
I know that you said that you are looking for off-the-shelf systems, but would love to help if I can.
I appreciate the recommendations and kind words.
I know that you said that you are looking for off-the-shelf systems, but would love to help if I can.
Brian27
New Member
Holy wow. I'm sure Signburst is a great company and all but...I mean...I literally just built a new i7 4.4ghz desktop for one of my office employees on Amazon 5 minutes ago and it was less expensive than their bottom of the line i3 3.4 Flare.
I know you want something off the shelf but you're going to waste a massive amount of money buying a pre-built high end computer.
The below build was less than $1300 on Amazon. I have nearly the identical build on this PC but with 32gb of Ram and a better video card. It starts up in 12 seconds and loads photoshop, illustrator (or any addobe app) and Versaworks instantly. You don't even need a $200 graphics card either. The integrated graphics in the 4790 is sufficient for most everything besides 3d modeling (which we're doing) and gaming.
Pay some geek squad nerd $200 to put them together and you're still coming out a few thousands ahead.
Gigabyte ATX DDR3 LGA 1150 SATA DIMM 6Gb/s Motherboard (GA-Z97X-UD3H)
Corsair Carbide Series SPEC-02 Mid Tower Gaming Case (CC-9011051-WW)
G.SKILL RipjawsX Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000) Desktop Memory Model F3-2133C9D-16GXH
Intel Core BX80646I74790K i7-4790K Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.40 GHz)
Windows 7 Professional SP1 64bit (OEM)
EVGA 430 W1 80+, 430W Continuous Power, 3 Year Warranty Power Supply 100-W1-0430-KR
EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB SSC GAMING ACX 2.0+, Whisper Silent Cooling Graphics Card 02G-P4-2966-KR
Asus 24x DVD-RW Serial-ATA Internal OEM Optical Drive DRW-24B1ST (Black)
Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-75E1T0B/AM)
I know you want something off the shelf but you're going to waste a massive amount of money buying a pre-built high end computer.
The below build was less than $1300 on Amazon. I have nearly the identical build on this PC but with 32gb of Ram and a better video card. It starts up in 12 seconds and loads photoshop, illustrator (or any addobe app) and Versaworks instantly. You don't even need a $200 graphics card either. The integrated graphics in the 4790 is sufficient for most everything besides 3d modeling (which we're doing) and gaming.
Pay some geek squad nerd $200 to put them together and you're still coming out a few thousands ahead.
Gigabyte ATX DDR3 LGA 1150 SATA DIMM 6Gb/s Motherboard (GA-Z97X-UD3H)
Corsair Carbide Series SPEC-02 Mid Tower Gaming Case (CC-9011051-WW)
G.SKILL RipjawsX Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000) Desktop Memory Model F3-2133C9D-16GXH
Intel Core BX80646I74790K i7-4790K Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.40 GHz)
Windows 7 Professional SP1 64bit (OEM)
EVGA 430 W1 80+, 430W Continuous Power, 3 Year Warranty Power Supply 100-W1-0430-KR
EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB SSC GAMING ACX 2.0+, Whisper Silent Cooling Graphics Card 02G-P4-2966-KR
Asus 24x DVD-RW Serial-ATA Internal OEM Optical Drive DRW-24B1ST (Black)
Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-75E1T0B/AM)
SignBurst PCs
New Member
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]While I do understand the spirit of the previous post, I don't completely agree. I am a firm believer in the saying, "you get what you pay for".
While true, if you were to simply add up the costs of those components, the initial cost would be lower than buying one of our systems. That system would most closely resemble our Inferno although the Inferno is spec'ed with a few more (and more modern) components, which would add to the total. To be fair though, if one were to simply add up the costs of materials for a sign, is that what you would sell the sign for? I wouldn't think so, unless you don't want to be in business very long. Our prices are inline with other computer manufactured with similar spec's.
Even if you were to "pay some geek squad nerd $200 to put them together" are you really getting the same thing? Not in my estimation. First, we build our systems with top-notch components for a reason. While using "previous generation" and "bare minimum" components may work for some folks, we believe that going that extra mile and building with superior components is in our customers best interest. Yes, they cost a little more, but are usually designed to last longer, be more reliable, and have longer warranties. If a component fails, how much does a computer's down time really cost? It is different for everyone, but in our experience, a down computer can be catastrophic and very costly. We take pride in our computers and have been carefully and professionally assembling our systems for 14 years now. We scrutinize everything from component quality, drivers, to build quality and aesthetics. We care about what we are putting out the door.
When you buy one of our computers, the actual computer purchase is just the beginning of the relationship. Our customers call with all kinds of issues and we always try to assist in every way possible (i.e. setup, network troubleshooting, software questions and issues, work-flow recommendations, storage and backup considerations, and much more). I really enjoy helping my customers and these services are provided FREE OF CHARGE. I appreciate their business and will do whatever I can (within reason) to assist when they need it. I can't really say the same about Amazon or the local "geek squad nerd".
How much is that worth to you? That is a question that only you can answer. We save our customers countless hours of frustration and billable service hours by helping when they would otherwise have to pay a computer consulting/service/repair company. We don't promise to completely replace your computer support company, but we just might. Many of our customers haven't had to call a computer support company since buying their first SignBurst computer system.
We are familiar with the software that our customers use and can not only make system recommendations based on their software requirements, but can often avoid potential problems ahead of time. We assist our customers in setting up their software to take advantage of the speed in our computers. If they ever need help setting up their computer and/or software, we are happy to help.
We don't claim to know everything about all of the industry-specific software out there. There is a lot of software out there and there are just some things that only the software companies can fix. In some instances though, we have direct lines of communication to software companies and can get you help when their tech support lines don't answer or put you on hold for extended periods of time. We have friends in the industry and will leverage those relationships to help our customers if we can.
While we build very stable and reliable computers, they are still computers and can have issues. We try and avoid as many of those issues as we can by building with high-quality components and educating our customers on a few “best practices”, but our customers do occasionally run into problems. Regardless of when they bought their computer from us, we do our best to help. I can think of one example of a customer with a 4 year old SignBurst Inferno that had a failing hard drive. While, technically, they were out of our warranty, I was able to walk them through replacing the drive, restoring a backup image from the night before, and they were back operational in a couple hours. This was possible because they had followed our instructions when they received their computer and called us because they didn't feel comfortable setting up their own backup. We logged in remotely and setup their backup for them. In addition, I walked them though getting their failing hard drive replaced through the manufacturer as it had a 5yr warranty. Now they have a spare. Just yesterday, I got a call from a customer who bought their computer over a year ago. They were having trouble getting their plugins working in Flexi and couldn't get a good backup to complete. We got the Flexi issue handled pretty quickly, but the backup issue was more complex. As it turned out, they had a trojan in one of their shadow copies (system restore points). After it was removed, the backups started to complete. It took a couple hours to figure out and resolve, but it looks like we got it taken care of. Neither of these were necessarily our "responsibility", but I am glad that I could help.
I guess that what I am trying to explain is that there is value to buying a SignBurst beyond the initial cost. We see it as a partnership with our customers and want to help them succeed. We go above and beyond to help our customers if we possibly can. It is difficult to explain the level of commitment that we have to our customers, but hopefully our customers understand.[/FONT]
While true, if you were to simply add up the costs of those components, the initial cost would be lower than buying one of our systems. That system would most closely resemble our Inferno although the Inferno is spec'ed with a few more (and more modern) components, which would add to the total. To be fair though, if one were to simply add up the costs of materials for a sign, is that what you would sell the sign for? I wouldn't think so, unless you don't want to be in business very long. Our prices are inline with other computer manufactured with similar spec's.
Even if you were to "pay some geek squad nerd $200 to put them together" are you really getting the same thing? Not in my estimation. First, we build our systems with top-notch components for a reason. While using "previous generation" and "bare minimum" components may work for some folks, we believe that going that extra mile and building with superior components is in our customers best interest. Yes, they cost a little more, but are usually designed to last longer, be more reliable, and have longer warranties. If a component fails, how much does a computer's down time really cost? It is different for everyone, but in our experience, a down computer can be catastrophic and very costly. We take pride in our computers and have been carefully and professionally assembling our systems for 14 years now. We scrutinize everything from component quality, drivers, to build quality and aesthetics. We care about what we are putting out the door.
When you buy one of our computers, the actual computer purchase is just the beginning of the relationship. Our customers call with all kinds of issues and we always try to assist in every way possible (i.e. setup, network troubleshooting, software questions and issues, work-flow recommendations, storage and backup considerations, and much more). I really enjoy helping my customers and these services are provided FREE OF CHARGE. I appreciate their business and will do whatever I can (within reason) to assist when they need it. I can't really say the same about Amazon or the local "geek squad nerd".
How much is that worth to you? That is a question that only you can answer. We save our customers countless hours of frustration and billable service hours by helping when they would otherwise have to pay a computer consulting/service/repair company. We don't promise to completely replace your computer support company, but we just might. Many of our customers haven't had to call a computer support company since buying their first SignBurst computer system.
We are familiar with the software that our customers use and can not only make system recommendations based on their software requirements, but can often avoid potential problems ahead of time. We assist our customers in setting up their software to take advantage of the speed in our computers. If they ever need help setting up their computer and/or software, we are happy to help.
We don't claim to know everything about all of the industry-specific software out there. There is a lot of software out there and there are just some things that only the software companies can fix. In some instances though, we have direct lines of communication to software companies and can get you help when their tech support lines don't answer or put you on hold for extended periods of time. We have friends in the industry and will leverage those relationships to help our customers if we can.
While we build very stable and reliable computers, they are still computers and can have issues. We try and avoid as many of those issues as we can by building with high-quality components and educating our customers on a few “best practices”, but our customers do occasionally run into problems. Regardless of when they bought their computer from us, we do our best to help. I can think of one example of a customer with a 4 year old SignBurst Inferno that had a failing hard drive. While, technically, they were out of our warranty, I was able to walk them through replacing the drive, restoring a backup image from the night before, and they were back operational in a couple hours. This was possible because they had followed our instructions when they received their computer and called us because they didn't feel comfortable setting up their own backup. We logged in remotely and setup their backup for them. In addition, I walked them though getting their failing hard drive replaced through the manufacturer as it had a 5yr warranty. Now they have a spare. Just yesterday, I got a call from a customer who bought their computer over a year ago. They were having trouble getting their plugins working in Flexi and couldn't get a good backup to complete. We got the Flexi issue handled pretty quickly, but the backup issue was more complex. As it turned out, they had a trojan in one of their shadow copies (system restore points). After it was removed, the backups started to complete. It took a couple hours to figure out and resolve, but it looks like we got it taken care of. Neither of these were necessarily our "responsibility", but I am glad that I could help.
I guess that what I am trying to explain is that there is value to buying a SignBurst beyond the initial cost. We see it as a partnership with our customers and want to help them succeed. We go above and beyond to help our customers if we possibly can. It is difficult to explain the level of commitment that we have to our customers, but hopefully our customers understand.[/FONT]