[sil (Steve)]

I won’t add confusion. I used to built custom graphic PCs to computer against silicon graphics in 3D modelling/rendering markets. Anyway what you can get these days for home is pretty powerful except in some areas where the software is bloated and not optimised to make best use of the hardware. Too many assumptions.

Even though I can build a machine to my desires I’m not up to date with motherboard sizes shapes and cases to suit and going for state of the art is impractical for most but the super rich and nobody cares a toss if you have the latest graphics card as it’ll be superceded with a week anyway. But because some do want those bragging rights you can find last years state of the art gear second hand cheap. But of course you have to assume a second hand graphics card has been well used overclocked and may have little life left. Then there’s those who use the cards for mining cryptocurrencies also greatly reducing lifespan. My last couple of towers I bought prebuilt from Scorptec and they have been rock solid. Their build quality is great with cabling out of the way allowing me easy access for upgrades. Important to me now having only one working arm to use. My main machine I bought knowing I wanted to maximise memory and a few other upgrades, so I chose configuration based on that and not able to pay for state of the art on each component. So I chose a high end cpu (since changing would be difficult for me alone) and a minimum of cheap ram (knowing I could afford a heap of quality ram in 6mths, drives i have a heap sitting doing nothing at all times. Anyway It gave me a machine that had some ram limitations for a while and a low end gfx card then uprading was dead easy to a Quadro gfx card and 128GB RAM at the time I had the extra money to buy best I could at that time. Its a great machine and my monitor is a calibrated Dell 37” which is a ton of realestate for my gfx needs.

So I recommend know your needs and wants for today and for the future. Ram is easy to change even for computer newbs, so maybe go for minimal amount of cheap ram today knowing to upgrade to more of better later on. More cost effective that way. I can highly recommend anything from Scorptec. Not only for quality but for customer service and they have a heap of configurations readily available for price points and they are well thought out . It gives you a working machine today and one you can add to to upgrade as money permits and you have to assume anything you upgrade is money lost so take that into account as total cost of ownership of the machine you want and work towards.